


scientia lumen vitae

by thedevilchicken



Category: Tu vas me manquer - Maître Gims (Music Video)
Genre: Clones, Developing Relationship, Far Future, IN SPACE!, M/M, Science Fiction, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-16
Updated: 2016-05-16
Packaged: 2018-06-08 22:11:55
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 41,127
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6875686
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thedevilchicken/pseuds/thedevilchicken
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>On the Valhallan planet named Fólkvangr, the clone Loïc Treize has been working towards a cure for Thor's Virus throughout his entire life. He is not Valhallan. He was sent there to help. He was <i>born</i> to help, a fact of which he is acutely aware. </p><p>Eiður is Valhallan. He is a bluff, congenial military commander in the service of the Valhallan Commonwealth, and he is Treize's new custodian. His approach is wholly new, and Treize is drawn to him despite his society's strict rules. What he wants is forbidden.</p><p>From Fólkvangr to the lumenium mines of Þruðvangr and the military installations of Treize's people on the planet Nivôse, the pair have a lot of ground to cover. And when Thor's Virus strikes hard, they have no time to lose...</p>
            </blockquote>





	scientia lumen vitae

**Author's Note:**

  * For [sevenofspade](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sevenofspade/gifts).



> For sevenofspade for Jukebox 2016, based on their prompts and the music video for _Tu vas me manquer_ by Maître Gims. 
> 
> The video is hopefully available on Youtube here: [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KA3Q1duzwaE) with an English translation of the lyrics [here](http://lyricstranslate.com/en/tu-vas-me-manquer-i-will-miss-you.html). The main character is based on the singer in the video.
> 
> The title "scientia lumen vitae" translates roughly as "knowledge is the light of life". All apologies for the (mis)use of Norse mythology, French and Icelandic names, and the _calandrier républicain français_.
> 
> sevenofspade: I suspect you weren't expecting a fic this long, but your prompt inspired me and I genuinely hope that you enjoy the result!

Five years before the war began, Loïc 13 synthesised the first effective treatment for Thor's Virus. In doing so, he succeeded where all Valhallan scientists had tried and failed since the first appearance of the virus, seventy years earlier. He, of course, was not Valhallan.

The breakthrough came in his laboratory on the Valhallan second planet Fólkvangr, the place he'd called his home since birth. He was a fully matured clone who'd been out of the glass for seven years by the time he created the treatment, with the appearance of a man of twenty-two. He was one of only a handful of clones living outside their twelve home planets, and he was the thirteenth instance of the Loïc genre. 

The Vortex Corporation had never intended for there to be a thirteenth clone genre, but the Loïcs had been required and so they'd been produced. Vortex hadn't intended for there to be a thirteenth instance of Loïc any more than they'd intended the Loïc genre to exist, either. Clones of the Treizième République had only ever existed in multiples of twelve before Loïc: there were twenty-four instances of _Magalie_ , for example, who oversaw the one hundred and forty-four instances of _Benoît_ who administered the Treizième cloning programme. 

There were three hundred thousand Yvettes in the Treizième civil service. There were six million _Oliviers_ and six million _Sylvies_ who formed the Treizième military complex and all that entailed. There were, until the birth of Loïc 13, just twelve instances of the Loïc genre. The Treizième government had him made for the Valhallans, to aid their struggle against the virus that plagued them, though Vortex showed initial reluctance to operate outside their SOP. In the end, however, they relented, and they made the thirteenth instance of the thirteenth genre.

And so Loïc 13, known to the Valhallans as _Treize_ , was born on the ship on the way from Brumaire to Fólkvangr. On his arrival, the Valhallans took him to the lab that would become his home and locked him there inside. He understood their need to isolate him from society as the treaty between their two peoples was tenuous at best, even then. He understood his purpose, understood his nature, and he had no desire to escape from his captivity there in the lab. They guarded him anyway, and he understood that, too.

Seven years after his arrival, five years before the war began, he gave them a treatment for Thor's Virus. It only was a treatment, however, and not a cure; he'd had a breakthrough but not a final success.

And so, he continued to work. 

\---

On the third day of the third week of Fólkvangr's long winter, Treize woke up with the alarm as usual and gave it its usual verbal command to stop its irritating buzz. It stopped buzzing. It was time to start another day, just like the twelve years of days that had gone before it.

He turned back the fur bedspread, removed the transceiver from its housing at the base of his skull and swapped it for the pair of glasses from the small wooden table by the bed, where they sat safely as he slept each night. He pressed the pressure pad to activate their neural interface and watched as the room flickered from darkness into light around him. All instances of the Loïc genre have been born blind by design and though Treize is an exception to a great many rules, that is not one of them. He has always needed the glasses to see, and he's seen a great many things. He's seen a great many things more than anyone intended that he should.

He rose and he went into the adjoining stone-floored, stone-walled bathroom, brushed his teeth, shaved and showered as he always did. He towelled dry then dressed, as he always did, in the Treizième clothing that the Vortex Corporation shipped to him monthly with his lab supplies; that day it was a black jumpsuit, a little baggy for lab work but he'd roll up the sleeves and put on disposable gloves and a disposable apron when work began for the day and that would be more than adequate. Then he sat down on the edge of the bed and he waited for the locked bedroom door to swing open in front of him, as it did each morning, as it always did. 

He waited. The door didn't open. 

He could have slipped his transceiver back into place, lain back down and seen if Trois or Sept had come online for their nights, on the Treizième planets Thermidor and Fructidor respectively. He hadn't seen them in the link for months by then, their schedules entirely dissimilar to his, though the visual data from their neural interfaces downloaded direct into his brain each night so he couldn't say he'd ever really felt completely apart from them. Loïcs 5 and 9, Cinq and Neuf, kept the closest schedules to his own on their worlds Nivôse and Frimaire, and so he saw them most often of all the Loïcs in the link. He liked Cinq. He wasn't as fond of Neuf. 

He _could_ have slipped his transceiver back in, but he waited instead with his hands spread out wide on his thighs, sweating faintly against the shiny outer layer of the jumpsuit. It was curious that the door hadn't opened as it had each morning at the same time for twelve years by then, and he could hear nothing at all of his custodian outside the door, in their shared living space above the lab downstairs. Captain Hallmar Haraldsson had been with him for nine years by then, replacing his first custodian, Captain Askur Baldursson. Askur had been in his final years of service, had had no interest in science and had consequently spent more time asleep from boredom than he had actually at his post. Hallmar had been quite different. 

Hallmar was an ageing, sharp-eyed, thoroughly taciturn Valhallan captain with steel grey hair and a chest-length beard. He spent hours watching Treize work while absently combing at his long grey beard with an incongruously dainty little comb that seemed to have been carved from some sort of seashell, almost like he didn't realise he was doing it. He'd been assigned to him, Treize had surmised on the captain's arrival, because the post was nominally important in theory but minimally demanding in reality. Hallmar had injured his knee at some point in the past, that much was obvious simply from the way he walked, and had likely taken the post to see out his career in relative inaction just as Askur had. Once they've taken the oath of service, Valhallan soldiers serve till death or their seventieth year, whichever visits them the sooner. 

And then the door opened, a good deal later than it should have. It wasn't Hallmar Haraldsson standing there in the doorway by the heavy old oak door; it was another Valhallan, much younger, ruddy-skinned with bright blonde hair that hung to his waist in a great thick braid. Treize's glasses read him at six and a half feet tall - the average height for a male Valhallan had been six feet two inches for more than three hundred years by then and he'd never heard of one measuring less than six feet, however, so the height of him didn't exactly come as a surprise. He had on the brown leather trousers and knee-high side-buckled boots Treize could only assume were common in the military from his limited experience, and he leaned with one thick, muscular arm against the doorframe, tugging at his twin-braided beard with his opposite hand.

"Aren't you coming out, then?" said the newcomer, looking straight at Treize, somehow seeming obscurely amused by the situation. His voice was deep, like it came from somewhere low in his chest, but filled with cheer in a way that Hallmar's had never been. It was so foreign a tone that Treize very nearly didn't recognise it. 

"Where's Hallmar?" Treize asked. 

"Retired," he said. "He turned seventy today and took himself off to live on Valhöll with his grandkids. They make ships and he's an ex-pilot so it sort of makes sense when you think about it." He looked away, glancing around Treize's rather bare bedroom. "I can't say I blame him for going, either. Doesn't this place even have windows?"

Treize frowned behind his glasses. Hallmar hadn't even said enough in their nine years together for him to know that he'd had children, let alone grandchildren, either there on Fólkvangr or on the Valhallan first world, Valhöll. And the place _didn't_ have windows, only thick stone walls. Fortunately, he'd never really felt he'd needed them.

"Who are you?" Treize asked.

"Hallmar's replacement," Hallmar's replacement replied, as if that weren't completely obvious, and he looked amused by that, too. And when he tilted his head at him, there was a thick torc there around his neck that Treize's glasses read as two long, twisting lengths of pure lumenium, the silver-white metal resting against his skin. He'd never seen so much of it in one place before, had never actually seen any more of it than the tiny amount set into the ring that he wore on one hand that matched one on the hand of each of the other Loïcs, and he doubted any Treizième at all had seen that much in decades, maybe centuries. Except, perhaps, for Jérôme Premier, the one who kept their reserves safely locked away and out of sight. 

"What's your name?" Treize asked.

"Eiður Oláfsson."

"And what's your rank, Eiður Oláfsson?"

"Commander." He pulled one long sleeve of his roughspun tunic up to his elbow and then the other, to show off the three dark tattooed rings around each wrist that marked his rank. Hallmar had had four at each wrist, though Treize had only seen them once or twice in all the years they'd been there together. Askur had worn short-sleeved tunics and so he'd almost always shown the four rings around each of his own wrists. They'd sent him a commander and not a captain, though he supposed the drop in rank didn't mean much of anything at all. It wasn't as if The Valhallans had found much of a use for him, after all. 

Treize stood and he headed for the door because frankly he'd run out of pertinent questions; Eiður shifted aside only barely far enough to let him pass, but he did pass. He smelled like leather and machine grease that seemed to be practically ingrained into his hands, but also a little like Treize imagined rain must smell and maybe he'd been outside in it before he'd come there. Maybe it was raining right at that moment, though Treize had never seen the outdoors, not on Fólkvangr and certainly not on Brumaire where his creation had begun before his birth in transit.

"I don't suppose they've sent me a scientist this time?" he asked, glancing back over his shoulder on the way to the tight spiral staircase that led down through the stone from the living quarters, down into the lab.

Eiður smiled and he raised his brows like that was amusing, too, like the whole world around him was amusing in some way. "Well, of course not," he said, following along behind. "You know what our military's like here. If you need a lab assistant, you're going to have to ask Vortex to send you one. And then hope the admirals don't fire them out of the cannon when they get here."

Treize supposed that was true and frowned to himself as he waited by the door to the lab. The Treizième had given him to the Valhallans and he'd always done what he'd been sent there for to the best of his not inconsiderable ability, but that didn't mean they meant to do more to assist him than was absolutely necessary. They likely had their own scientists in their own labs elsewhere the on Fólkvangr or over on Valhöll or maybe even on Þruðvangr though the icy mining world didn't exactly have a scientific reputation, working on the precise same problem, although cooperation and collaboration between teams might have been a sensible idea. Indeed, they'd been so distrusting of him that even his treatment for the virus had undergone almost six months of Valhallan testing before a single patient had been treated. It really hadn't needed six months, but he supposed he understood. 

He paused at the foot of the staircase. Eiður unlocked the door with one of the big metal keys that jangled from the ring that was attached to his belt, Hallmar's keys because they had labels still attached that the old captain had written in his bold, heavy hand, and they went inside. Treize supposed they were Eiður's keys now, though he hardly seemed like anyone's first choice for a custodian.

A good Valhallan architect can plan a building down to the last stone bathtub and bench and conveniently placed table. A good one plans to the last, most minute detail and then grows the stone to match the plan completely. A good one had planned Treize's lab - a good one if not a great one, since they'd planned for a man of around six feet two inches in height and Treize is the Treizième average of five feet ten exactly. So, over the years, sometimes his back and his shoulders had ached from stretching over too-high tabletops. 

Eiður hopped up onto the end of one of the long stone workbenches and swung his feet like Treize supposed a child might. Of course, he'd never met a child; he was drawing on Quatre's visual memories for that, of Treizième citizens' children on Pluviôse. There are no clone children, of course. Vortex created them all sterile to prevent it.

"Hallmar sat over there," Treize said, at least trying to be helpful since the worktop didn't seem like the most comfortable location for anyone to sit, and he gestured at an old wooden chair with a seat cushion upholstered in cracked old green leather. Eiður followed the gesture with his eyes and then looked back at Treize with a quirk of his brows and a shake of his head. 

"Yeah, I'm not sitting there," he said, tucking his hands under his thighs and leaning forward to glance curiously around the room. "Maybe when I'm pushing seventy. Can I just ask: what did Hallmar actually _do_ here?"

Treize put on his disposable apron and tied it around his waist. "He watched me work," he said, and pulled on a pair of disposable gloves.

"Excuse me for saying so, but that doesn't sound particularly fulfilling," Eiður said.

Treize shrugged, gathering his newest samples from the incubator and spreading them on the bench. He looked at him and maybe almost smiled, which was a very odd feeling after so many years.

"He also combed his beard," Treize said.

Eiður twirled one of his six inch long beard braids around his forefinger, one eyebrow arched comedically. "And do I look like the beard-combing type?" he asked. 

Treize stopped prepping for a moment to eye him across the lab. He was still sitting there on the polished stone worktop, swinging his long legs, his expression somewhere between nonchalant and wryly amused. He was a great thick tree of a man with impressively broad shoulders and bulky arms, narrow hips and thighs like oaks, like he was fresh from the Valhallan games and definitely not an ageing captain sent to their captive Treizième scientist to see out what was left of his career. He was young, perhaps in his early thirties at the very most, and was the single chattiest person Treize had ever met - of course, Treize had limited experience in the particular area of meeting people.

"No, you don't look like the beard-combing type," Treize said, and he set down the samples and leaned against the edge of his bench. "What did you do to get sent here?"

"It's meant to be a promotion," Eiður said.

Treize tilted his head. "We both know it's not."

Eiður stopped swinging his legs. His amusement faded quickly. 

"Then we'd best pretend we both believe it is," he said, and then he smiled and he swung his legs again, like that moment had never come at all.

So there'd be secrets between them. Treize found he could live with that quite readily.

\---

Life under the new regime was nothing like life under the old one. 

Eiður left all the doors unlocked. When they left the lab at the end of that first day, Treize expected him to fish up the key from the ring at his belt and lock the door behind them but he didn't, and later that night there was no curfew, no directive for Treize to leave the living space and go to bed and leave him there. Where Hallmar would have sent him away and sent messages that Treize could never quite hear from their communication link there in the living space, Eiður talked for hours instead, sitting in the armchair Hallmar had always occupied in the evenings but with one leg tossed carelessly over the arm as he toyed with the end of his long braid. His accent wasn't quite like Hallmar's or Askur's, either, not that either of them had spoken enough for Treize to make a thorough comparison. The overall effect was disconcerting. 

That first night, before he housed his transceiver and entered the link, Treize lay awake in bed and listened for the turn of the key in the lock of his bedroom door, but it never came. The following night, he tested the door handle and found it was indeed unlocked. The third night, he went out into the living space while all the lights were out - not an issue at all for his glasses - and fell asleep in Hallmar's chair just to see if he could. The sound of Eiður's door swinging open and the handle striking the wall was what woke him in the morning instead of his alarm.

"Didn't feel like bed?" Eiður asked, and when Treize put on his glasses and thumbed on the interface, he was stretching hugely and rather shirtlessly in his bedroom doorway. 

"Hallmar always locked the doors," Treize replied by way of explanation, as Eiður hooked his fingers on the top of the doorframe not too far above his head. He performed an experimental pull-up with it, the muscles in his chest and abdomen all pulling tight while the wooden frame creaked precariously with his weight. He _definitely_ wasn't an ageing captain, and not just because the tattoos around his wrists made him a commander.

"I'm not Hallmar," Eiður pointed out in reference to the door locks, and dropped down to his bare feet on the stone floor with his low-slung pyjama trousers only barely maintaining their tenuous hold on his hips, though that particular fact didn't seem to bother him one bit. "Besides, what are you going to do? There's nothing in the lab that could blast through these walls, there are guards outside the door all day and all night and even if you killed me in my sleep, where exactly are you going to go?"

"I think I'm going to go to the shower," Treize said, tipped somewhat off balance by the whole thing, and he pulled himself up out of the chair to evading the point not quite deftly. Eiður laughed and watched him go. And while he was in there, showering, he stoically didn't think about the fact that his new custodian was completely correct: he had nowhere to go. And even more than that, even had the front door been standing wide open, even had the guards abandoned their posts completely, he wouldn't have left. He had nowhere to go, and he was tied there by his sense of duty anyway.

For the first few days, Eiður sat on the same lab worktop and swung his legs and talked as Treize worked. They ate lunch in the lab's small break area at a stone table sitting on stone benches and Eiður talked. After lunch, Eiður exercised between two disused benches, dipping down between them on his hands then standing to perform some sort of set routine with a spatula standing in for a sword, and he _talked_. He talked throughout.

"Are you ever quiet?" Treize asked on the fourth day, pausing over his samples as if the thought had only just occurred.

Eiður looked over at him from yet another spatula-assisted sword form and shrugged his shoulders. "Not really," he replied. "Why do you ask?"

"Well, you've been here for four days now and you've already said more to me than Hallmar did in nine years."

"You know, if I said I'm shocked, I'd be lying," Eiður said, and continued his form as if he hadn't stopped. Oddly, Treize found the sound of his boots on the stone floor wasn't any more distracting than the chatter, and frankly the chatter hadn't distracted him at all. "He was always a tight-lipped old crow at the best of times. And he fucking hates the Treizième. The only thing I'm shocked about is he didn't throttle you in your sleep one night and have done with it."

Treize took a seat on a stool at the workbench. "Why would he do that?"

Eiður completed his form, tossed the spatula up in the air and caught it behind his back. Treize guessed that wasn't, strictly speaking, part of the routine, and probably wouldn't have worked with the longsword that he'd brought with him into Treize's strange cage.

"His wife was on Niflheim," Eiður said, suddenly vastly more serious with it.

"I didn't know," Treize replied, because it turned out he hadn't known very much about Hallmar Haraldsson at all, and they left it at that. There didn't seem to be much more to say about it. After all, _his wife was on Niflheim_ explained it all. 

Treize went back to work and Eiður went back to his sword forms and when the big Valhallan inevitably started to talk again, it wasn't about Niflheim. It was about his third sister's academy for swordsmiths on Valhöll, the sister who'd made the sword that was sitting in a thick leather sheath in the corner of the living space upstairs, the one that Treize hadn't touched but had a suspicion he'd be hard pressed to lift up high enough for a proper fight anyway. But he was only half listening, not that Eiður seemed to mind in the slightest. 

Almost forty years earlier, Treizième soldiers had landed on the Valhallan moon of Niflheim and shot all of the Valhallan miners working there on it. They flew the Treizième flag there for eight months and called it _Hiver_ instead of _Niflheim_ until all talks between their peoples had completely failed, then Valhallan troops had flooded in from neighbouring Þruðvangr and taken it back. But in the end, six hundred Valhallans had still lost their lives, and all for a lumenium mine that had run dry in less than a year afterwards. Treize wished he could say the incident had been an aberration, but it was hardly the only time their two peoples had fought over the years.

The Treizième had taken the Mandar homeworld and its many moons by military force, for their lumenium, over a century before that; in doing so, they'd robbed them almost entirely of their systems for space travel that had relied on the metal. They'd formed tight and binding trade pacts with the vast and disparate river worlds of the Indusian Empire, mercifully none of which used their lumenium for technology at all, though aggressive mining had rendered some of those worlds at least partially uninhabitable. The only one of the remaining great post-Earth civilisations who hadn't yielded their lumenium to the Treizième was the Valhallan Commonwealth, with its three worlds and their myriad moons, and that was very simply just because the Valhallans had the will and the means to fight them for it, and exactly who would win was never quite clear. None of the others had, but the Valhallans were warriors, a people under military rule.

No one has had to ask in centuries why lumenium is so precious, not since the ships first left Earth and encountered it on their new worlds: it's the element behind Treizième cloning technology, and how Valhallans grow their great stone halls. It's impossible to synthesise. It's the cornerstone of whole civilisations. Without it, Treize and the millions of clones of the Treizième République would never have had life at all. And there was enough of it hanging around Eiður Oláfsson's neck for a hundred thousand clones or more. The notion was intriguing. 

That night, Treize returned to the lab while the lights were out, just because he could, because the unlocked doors were more freedom than he'd ever had before and more freedom than he'd ever realised he might want. He'd meant to do another hour or so of work because he felt like this time he was getting closer to a cure than he ever had before, but he sat himself down on a stool and found himself pondering that lumenium torc around Eiður's neck instead. It rubbed against a ring of skin around his throat and by his collarbones that it turned faintly blue from contact, and it shifted there, glinting in the light as he moved. He could see him in his sword forms, the lumenium shining white in the lab lights as his broad shoulders shifted, as he lunged down to one knee, as he thrust back sharply with one elbow as if introducing it to an invisible opponent's face. He was obviously very skilled, very precise and very well-trained, and there was something about him, something beside his incessant chattering, that marked him out from the handful of Valhallans Treize had met. The Loïcs have very nearly perfect recall of every sense to aid their work, a factor that perhaps played a part in the difficulty of their production. They'd taken years. From what Treize knew, it hadn't been simple. 

The lights came on and his glasses adjusted quickly. It wasn't quite sudden; he'd heard footsteps on the stairs. 

"Is there a reason you're sitting in the dark?" Eiður asked from the doorway, shirtless and barefoot in his precariously loose pyjama trousers. 

"It's not as strange as it looks," Treize replied. "You see, I don't actually need light to see."

"Then that makes one of us," Eiður said. "It's the glasses that do it?"

"Yes, it's the glasses."

"And without them...?"

"I'm completely blind without them."

Eiður grinned. "Then maybe I won't ask for a pair for my birthday," he said, and Treize smiled in spite of himself. 

"I'm sure they'd suit you."

Eiður arched one brow. "Yeah, they'd really compliment my sword," he replied, smile still firmly in place, then he crossed his arms over his chest, somehow not managing to look stern in the slightest. He wasn't exactly Hallmar Haraldsson, after all. "Now go back to bed, would you? I can practically hear you thinking down here and I need my beauty sleep."

Treize said nothing about Eiður's requirement or indeed otherwise for 'beauty sleep' and dutifully returned to bed.

\---

In the link, they all wear white. 

In the link, the walls are white and the floors are white. The ceilings are white and the lights are white, bright white in a way that would probably hurt Treize's eyes if he weren't already blind. The furniture is white, a hoop of white couches set down into the floor right in the centre of the large round room, one for each of the thirteen of them, and they sit there underneath thirteen large viewscreens, also one for each of them. The screens show everything that Treize has missed since he last joined the link from the visual memory of each of the other Loïc instances; if he's not alone there, and he's usually not, the screens will show different things to each of them. After all, the link isn't a physical place. It's a construct, suspended there between their minds, different but still strangely the same from one Loïc to the next. And the dimensions always seem just very slightly wrong, because twelve years ago they had to add an extra space; the scale is off, and Treize sometimes wonders if he's the reason everything there feels just a step removed from reality.

Treize had been into the link every night for each of his twelve years by then, and he continued to do so after Eiður's arrival. That much didn't change, at least. Many other things did.

Eiður, it turned out, was inquisitive and far from unintelligent, and though his big hands seemed more used to the hilt of a sword, the mechanics of a spaceship or the reins of a mountainous Valhallan horse than to a pipette or a petri dish, he took quite well to Treize's delicate lab work. After a week of kicking his heels against the sides of benches and waving a spatula around like a deadly weapon, almost endearingly unperturbed by how ridiculous it looked, one morning Eiður came into the lab, put his hands on the edge of Treize's workbench, and said, "I'm bored of not doing anything. I want to help." 

"Have you ever done any lab work?" Treize asked. 

"Not a bit," Eiður replied, strangely upbeat about it. "But I like to think that just means I don't have bad habits you need to beat out of me." 

Treize found he had to admit there was a certain strange logic to that sentiment, and so he started to train him. 

He watched at first, closely, almost alarmingly closely as neither Hallmar nor Askur had taken a great deal of interest in the work and so he'd never been quite so finely observed in his whole life so far, but then he had him fetch and carry and the next thing he knew, he was ordering twice the supply of disposable aprons and several boxes of gloves in Eiður's ridiculous hand size with the next supply run scheduled to come in from the Treizième. They looked odd on him when they arrived, his tunic sleeves rolled up to the elbows and the gloves pulled up over the rings tattooed around his wrists, especially once his long braid had been pinned up to the back of his head so it couldn't fall forward into the samples and he'd put on a pair of new lab glasses. He was the most unlikely-looking scientist any of the Loïcs had ever encountered. 

Of course, there were occasional hiccups. While he was busy demonstrating proper lab technique, he let a batch over-incubate and had to start again from scratch. Eiður corrupted several samples, realised with a colourful curse and spent half the night re-preparing them so they'd be ready in the morning as planned. Then they blew up a week's worth of work in a literal puff of smoke - and a spray of disgusting pink ooze - and spent the afternoon cleaning it up from every flat surface in the lab. 

"Does this happen a lot?" Eiður asked, as they were dropping ooze-soaked cloths into the disposal chute. Even had Treize been contemplating escape, the chute wouldn't have been a particularly valid option; it terminated in the feed of a clinical waste incinerator. From what Eiður told him, the lab was part of a medical complex. He hadn't even known that, before. No one had ever thought to tell him, and he honestly hadn't thought to ask.

"More than I usually like to admit," Treize replied, and Eiður shook his head in mock disappointment as they traipsed back up the stairs to clean themselves off, too. He didn't tell him about the time he'd blown up the samples all over Hallmar, and how unimpressed he'd looked at pink ooze getting into his beard. It wasn't exactly something you could just comb out.

Treize was sitting on the couch in the living space, freshly showered and clad in clothing that didn't carry a faint odour of singed chemicals, when Eiður returned from his own shower. Except Eiður wasn't clothed when he returned. He wasn't even mostly dry as he loitered in his bedroom doorway, towelling off his long hair that had been pulled down out of its usual braid. The readouts Treize's glasses piped into his brain fizzed with new information: the length of his unbraided hair and beard, the exact width of his thighs, faint scars and the hue of unsunned skin, the girth of his cock. He didn't need to know. He hadn't needed to see. His stomach clenched. He felt faintly horrified, though mostly at himself.

"I know I'm good looking but you don't have to stare," Eiður said, looking highly amused by this. "Please don't tell me you've never seen a naked man before." 

"Can I count myself?" Treize replied, not quite sheepish, closer to embarrassed or at least confused. "Hallmar didn't even consider unlocking my door until he'd showered, dressed and eaten breakfast."

"No, you can't count yourself," Eiður said, with a sad shake of his head. "You've led a sheltered life." Then he frowned, paused, tilted his head as he looked at him across the room, still towelling his hair. "I realise this is a fucking stupid question at this point in time but what am I meant to call you? I've never asked."

"I'm Loïc Treize," Treize replied, before he'd even thought about it. It was his name, but it felt sort of strange to say it out loud because he never had before, not outside of the link and that wasn't exactly real, strictly speaking. But, even more than that, the idea that anyone wanted to know how to address him seemed completely alien. After all, no Treizième clones would have found it difficult, and if an ordinary Treizième citizen had recognised his genre - it was likely very few of them had ever met a Loïc, given their work - then they wouldn't have struggled, either. Individual clones have always been addressed formally by genre and instance, and informally by instance alone: _Loïc Treize_ , or simply _Treize_.

Treize pulled up his left sleeve and held out his arm, because for some odd reason that felt like the thing to do under the circumstances. His number was tattooed there on the inside of his left wrist like all clones' numbers were and Eiður, still naked and dripping shower water on the floor from his wet hair and wet body, came closer and took Treize's wrist in his hand. 

"I thought there were only twelve Loïcs," Eiður said, his thumb tracing the number three in thirteen against Treize's skin. Their two languages had developed very different writing systems by then, of course, but the Treizièmes and Valhallans had maintained common numerals even if the Mandars and the Indusians hadn't. 

"There _were_ only twelve." 

"So it's true that Vortex made you for us?"

Treize smiled faintly, wryly, though he was still eyeing Eiður's hand at his wrist. He didn't think he'd actually been touched since Benoîts 43 and 98 had helped him out of the glass-walled maturation chamber on the ship from Brumaire, and the contact was odd, warm, Eiður's hair dripping on his skin so he brushed the water away with one big, warm palm. 

"I suppose you could say that," Treize said. "I was made to cure Thor's Virus."

"Are you close to doing it?"

Treize considered this for a moment, then he nodded. "Yes, I think I am," he said.

Eiður let go of Treize's wrist and chucked him under the chin. "Then we'd better get back to work," he said, and he walked away, back into his room. Treize watched him go, watched the muscles in his back, the way his hair clung to his damp skin all the way to the dimples at the small of his back. He really never had seen a naked man in his life, at least not outside the other Loïcs' memories, if he couldn't count himself. He'd never really wanted to see one, but he could almost see the appeal when he considered Eiður Oláfsson.

That night, Treize turned off the neural link and set his glasses on the table by the bed. He slipped his transceiver into its housing, clicked it into place, and he lay down. Seconds later, he was in the link, walking down a familiar darkened corridor, pushing open a familiar luminescent white door at the end of it. When he stepped into the round room, Cinq and Neuf were already there, so he joined them on the couches in his designated spot. He'd never sat anywhere else. It really didn't seem right to, and he knew the rules.

"You've been flirting with Inès 119 again," Treize said to Cinq, eyeing the screen on the wall above Cinq's head. 

"Absolutely not my fault," Cinq replied. "It makes her smile and, really, _look_ at that smile." 

Cinq gestured at the screen but Treize was, in fact, already looking at Inès 119's smile on it. She had the clear olive skin and striking light green eyes that were common to the entire Inès genre but when she smiled and looked at Cinq like that, it was almost like she was the only Inès there had ever been. Not that Treize had or has met an Inès with whom he could compare her, or that at that moment he'd met any other instance of any other genre at all aside from the Benoîts and the Magalies who'd been there at his birth, at least not in the flesh. 

"Besides, I'm not the one who's been spending time with naked people," Cinq pointed out, and Treize wrinkled his nose. The whole scene was probably playing out for both Cinq and Neuf on his screen above him as they spoke, though he supposed at least they hadn't said anything about the explosion of pink ooze. 

"You're attracted to him," Neuf said, abruptly. 

"You know, there's a reason he doesn't like you," Cinq told Neuf. 

"And if he dislikes hearing the truth, then I don't exactly care if he doesn't like me."

"Would you mind not talking about me as if I'm not here?" Treize said. "How would you feel if I did that to you?"

Neuf raised his brows. "I wouldn't particularly care," he said, and Cinq shook his head. 

"We should petition Céleste to have this joyful ray of sunshine swap planets with Trois," Cinq said. "At least then we'd get to hear about something other than mining for a change."

Treize said something noncommittal and Cinq went back to needling Neuf who was, admittedly, very easy to needle. And Treize, for his part, sat back and idly watched the screens though he'd wake with all the information downloaded into his brain anyway so watching was hardly a requirement. It was part of the link, the sharing of visual information, something all instances did within their genres in their own unique ways, and fortunately each and every clone had been pre-programmed with the ability to lipread or the whole thing might've been somewhat lost on them. Full memories from all senses could only ever pass via direct download, after all, from an instance after death to that instance's next body. Neuf had lived three times and Cinq twice, though the Loïc genre had only been in use for forty years by then and their deaths had been accidental as a result of their experimental work rather than natural; some of the Oliviers were in the high thirties in terms of re-instances and carried the memories of all those lives, their deaths due mostly to military action though they'd been in service for very nearly five hundred years. 

Then, Treize was still the youngest clone, in terms of memories if not in terms of his physical instance. Several Sylvies and Oliviers had been re-instanced since his birth, but he'd only had this one lifetime. He was younger than all of them. He'd barely had time to develop his own personality, though technically personality wasn't supposed to exist. Either way, Loïc Premier liked to call him _Vierge_ because of it. 

But Neuf was right; he was attracted to Eiður. That was something none of the others had had, so perhaps they weren't so perfectly alike after all.

\---

"Don't you ever take a day off?" Eiður asked as he peeled off his gloves at the end of the day at the end of their fourth week. 

"No, not really," Treize replied, shutting away the samples for the night. "Hallmar had other commitments sometimes and he left me locked in my room instead of in the lab so technically I wasn't working, but I'm not sure that counts." 

Eiður sighed dramatically. "No, that doesn't count," he said, unpinning his braid so it flopped with similar dramatic flair down his back. "And you know, there's not some kind of official edict that says you've got to work all day locked up in a lab."

"There's not?"

Eiður's second sigh was practically the height of melodrama, even when compared with the first. "No, there's not," he said. "All it says is you should be in your custodian's custody at all times. That's not the same thing."

All Treize could think to say was, "Oh." And then they went upstairs to eat dinner. He tried to put the conversation out of his mind; there was something unsettling about it. After all, he had a job to do. That job was the only reason he was alive at all.

Three days later, Treize came out of his room in the morning to find Eiður sitting in the armchair with his sword lying across his knees. He was wearing a long leather coat and he was evidently waiting for him. 

"Are you going somewhere?" Treize asked, pretending not to notice his own disappointment with the notion. 

"I'm not retiring, if that's what you mean," Eiður replied, hoisting himself up out of the chair. "I know Hallmar and Askur disappeared without a trace the moment they hit seventy but I didn't age forty years overnight." He slung the sword over his shoulder and tossed a leather coat to Treize that looked similar to the one he was wearing, just smaller and shorter, likely because Treize was himself both smaller and shorter. "I know, I know, it's not really your style. But put it on anyway, we're going out."

Treize was frankly too taken aback by the prospect to do much except put the coat on as directed. Then Eiður opened the front door with one of the keys at his belt.

"Sir?" said one of the guards in the corridor outside, his hand on a gun at his waist. 

"Stand down. We're going out," Eiður told him.

"But we're meant to--"

"Your exact orders are to guard the fucking door, ensign. Can you tell me what you're guarding it from?"

The guards both frowned. 

"Yeah, I thought not. While we're out, why don't you check with your CO and see what your orders actually are." And Eiður nudged Treize past the two of them with one hand at his newly leather-clad shoulder. 

"Where are we going?" Treize asked, as Eiður led the way down the corridor and through a heavy wooden door into a stairwell. There was no one else there but Treize could hear voices echoing from the other corridors on other floors that led into it.

"Upstairs," Eiður replied, stating the obvious with a grin while he started to climb. Treize followed.

Treize had exercised for two half-hour periods every day since birth, usually mid-afternoon to reenergise himself for the rest of the day and then again in the early evening to build his appetite for dinner, but that turned out to be nowhere close to enough to reach the end of their climb sixteen floors up at Eiður's pace without being somewhat out of breath and somewhat resentful of the leather coat he'd been told to put on. But then Eiður opened a door right at the top and a blast of icy wind swirled in that made Treize shiver and begin tying the coat shut over his chest with its line of loose leather laces. 

"This is it," Eiður said, then flashed him a smile and led the way outside. 

It was snowing. The sky above the building was the icy silver-grey of lumenium and a languid rain of fat snowflakes fell down out of it, melted on Treize's upturned face, gathered on his glasses till he had to wipe them off to see. He'd seen snow in Cinq's memories of Nivôse and Neuf's of Frimaire quite often over the years, as their planets' surfaces were near-permanently cold just like the neighbouring Valhallan planet Þruðvangr - the cold wasn't quite so intense on Nivôse or Frimaire as on the Valhallan world, of course, but the Treizième have never been particularly well adapted to the cold. He'd seen snow in some of the others' memories, too, if less frequently than that, and he'd splashed his hands and face with cold water and conjured those memories and he'd thought he'd understood what snow was like, but it was different, perhaps because his genetic makeup had been tweaked just a fraction from the Loïc genre standard to make breathing the relatively high oxygen Valhallan air less problematic for him. Or perhaps snow was just something that required all of his senses to fully understand. 

"I've never been outside before," he said, before he'd even registered the thought, looking at the snowy streets when he stepped up to the stone parapet at the building's edge. The medical building they were in was by far not the tallest in the city but the view was more than Treize had ever imagined he'd see in a lifetime. He'd believed he'd live his life in the lab. He'd known not to hope for anything else.

"Yeah, I know," Eiður replied. "I talked to Askur and Hallmar. Askur said your ship flew straight into the hangar and the ground transport that picked you up had no windows, so you didn't even see the planet when you got here." 

And that much was true because Treize had been far into the interior of the Treizième starship by the time they'd landed, away from the viewports, preparing to disembark. He'd seen images of the Fólkvangr landscape while they'd been en route, of course, or at least he'd seen the few images they'd been able to retrieve as their government, the Valhallan Admiralty, wasn't generally the most cooperative where requests from the Treizième were concerned. He'd seen images but that morning was the first time he'd set foot outdoors at all. He'd never breathed fresh air, and the Valhallans' green energy sources meant the air there _was_ clean, unlike the atmosphere of some of the Treizième cities, no matter how hard they worked to scrub out all potential pollutants. 

"Y'know, you can get closer to the edge," Eiður said. "Unless you're scared of heights." 

So he inched closer to the parapet, the stone wall that only came up as far as his knees, and Eiður steadied him with his big hands. They settled at his shoulders at first, but then one arm went around Treize's waist and one foot went up on the wall for him to brace himself against as Treize leaned out, exhilarated by it, by the height and the view and maybe even by the contact. There were people in the street below, and a handful of the big Valhallan horses he'd seen in images on his way to Fólkvangr, their winter coats thick and shaggy against the cold. He'd never seen so many people and he leaned out again, saw the little hovering cars down the street outside the pedestrian zone. He saw a tall man and an even taller woman walking a big Valhallan hound that woofed good-naturedly at three young children who ran by dressed all in leathers and wools with long, trailing scarves, their laughing mother running behind with her long hair caught up in the wind. He saw more than he'd ever thought he'd see in his life, in thirty seconds leaning out over an ordinary Valhallan street.

"If you lean out any more, you're going to take us both over," Eiður said, and gave him a squeeze around his waist to punctuate the point. He could almost hear the near-permanent smile in Eiður's voice. "I mean, yes, we're in the right place for it if we did, and I'm sure they're great doctors down there, but do you really want to test it?"

"Pull me up," Treize said, so he did and suddenly the length of Treize's back was pressed up to the length of Eiður's front. He could feel Eiður's chest rising and falling against him, could feel his breath by his ear, his warm hands steadying him at his hips. 

"How are you so warm when it's so cold out here?" Treize asked. 

Eiður paused, like he was trying to decide how to word his answer, like the phrasing jarred in his head or caught in his throat or maybe like he just didn't want to tell him. Then he said, "You were made for the climate on Fólkvangr, right?"

Treize nodded. "Yes."

"My family's from Þruðvangr," Eiður said. "We've been there since the first landing. This isn't cold." He pressed one hand across Treize's exposed throat, the warmth of it making him shiver, like a demonstration. Then he stepped away and Treize turned to look at him, startled, disconcerted. 

"We should get back downstairs before the guards come looking," Eiður said. "Something tells me they'll be pissed off if they have to trail all the way up fourteen flights of stairs."

So they went back down, they hung up their coats, and they went back to work. And all the while, Treize tried hard not to think about the warmth of Eiður's skin on his.

\---

"That explains the accent," Cinq said, when Treize explained in the link three nights later, when he'd finally decided to share what Eiður had said. After all, he hadn't seen his lips move when he'd told him, so the others had no way of knowing till he told them in turn. That was just the way it worked. "You know who he reminds me of?"

Neuf sighed. "He's nothing like Jérôme," he said. 

"How did you know I was going to say that?"

"Because you haven't shut up about it since you found out," Neuf said. If Neuf hadn't been wearing his glasses, Treize had no doubt the look he gave Cinq would have been a rather solid glare. "How is it any different from Premier and Magalie 14?"

"That's Premier. He'd slept with half the Sylvies he'd ever met before he ran into Magalie 14." Cinq leaned back on the couch and spread his arms wide over the back of it. "This is _you_ , Neuf. Belligerent, bad-tempered you. Having real, honest-to-goodness sex with someone who's not your own right hand. Has Jérôme Premier had a recent head injury we don't know about? Did he think you were Trois?"

"Leave him alone, would you?" Treize said. 

"I don't need you to fight my battles for me, Treize," Neuf said, with a rather belligerent, bad-tempered look in his direction. 

Treize sighed. "Fine, forget I said anything," he said. 

Cinq chuckled. "Says the one who's this close to screwing the gigantic Valhallan."

Treize closed his eyes. It made no real difference, of course, because the link simulated their glasses and their neural interface along with them and closing his eyes did nothing to stop the information gathered by the glasses with its weights and measures and chemical compositions being piped directly into his brain. But it made him feel better, at the very least. 

Cinq was right in a way, of course - not about his relationship or lack thereof with his custodian, but about the accent. He'd been wondering since the first time they'd met why something seemed different about him, different from Hallmar and Askur that wasn't just his age and his disposition toward talking, and the fact that he came from the third of the three Valhallan worlds explained it quite neatly. Valhöll was by then considered the Valhallan homeworld but the very first colonists had made their home on Þruðvangr and when, ten or twenty long, hard winters later, the bulk of the Valhallan fleet had moved on and settled first Valhöll and then Fólkvangr, some had stayed behind. The worlds hadn't reconnected for another half century or more after that, or so the information gathered by the Treizième explained, and the inhabitants of the dark, icy, almost wholly inhospitable world maintained their own systems, their own planetary government, their own connections to their people's old ways, even though nominally they remained under the control of the Admiralty on Valhöll. 

It explained Eiður's accent. Perhaps it also explained his cordiality toward Treize, he thought - even though Jérôme 12, the Treizème ambassador to the Valhallans, resided on Valhöll, Þruðvangr still had the closest relations with the Treizième of any of the three Valhallan worlds. After all, Þruðvangr and Nivôse were practically neighbours. They'd been trading with each other for centuries, even when trade had been cut off on Valhöll and on Fólkvangr.

He had some personal experience of accents, of course. All clones are born with a homogeneous Brumaire accent, but the only ones who kept it over the years rather than their accents shifting slowly with the years were the ones who lived their lives on Brumaire, or of course the Célestes. As the head of the Vortex Corporation, the Céleste genre had always tried to maintain spotless propriety. Maybe that was why Eiður's accent seemed out of place: the accent of Þruðvangr was _not_ considered proper on the other worlds, not completely, and yet even though he didn't try to hide it in the slightest, it seemed Eiður Oláfsson had been accepted. It was intriguing.

The next time, they went down the staircase instead of up. 

They wound their way down once the guards had reluctantly let them past; apparently their commanding officers had confirmed the directive that, contrary to the twelve previous years of their not-quite-captive having remained locked indoors at all times, he didn't actually _have_ to remain locked indoors just as long as his custodian accompanied him. Eiður was there, large as life, almost larger just in terms of the bulk of muscle on his frame and the vivacity of his nature than the two young guards combined, accompanying him. 

They went down four floors, the descent much less arduous than their previous ascent had been, and down several long corridors where people glanced at the two of them curiously as they went about their business. Treize had to admit he didn't exactly fit in seamlessly with the local demographic, the Valhallans for the most part tall and fair where he was distinctly the opposite, and most would never have seen anyone from a planet outside their commonwealth. Perhaps one or two on Valhöll would have met a Treizième or an Indusian, but the Treizième ambassador genre, Jérôme, was over six feet tall, light-skinned and grey-eyed, albeit with stark black hair. 

And then they were outside, walking through the building's front doors and out into the snow-swept streets, and Eiður hung close at his side with his sword slung over one shoulder and one hand hovering there by the small of his back. While Treize paid studious inattention to Eiður's proximity, his glasses registered every inch of everything he saw as they walked, catalogued every snowflake, read every face, caught every glance in their direction. They were numerous.

"People are looking," Treize said, with a glance up at Eiður. 

Eiður shrugged. "Let them look," he said, and pressed his hand to Treize's back for a moment, over the thick leather of his borrowed coat that this time seemed somehow less borrowed and closer to a covert gift. Treize honestly wasn't sure how he felt about that idea, since he'd never actually received a gift and had no notion of why he would. "Some of these people owe you their lives, or might do one day." And that was a notion he wasn't sure how to understand, either.

All they did that day was walk, but that was more than enough for Treize. Almost everything he saw seemed new, not only because of the clear contrasts between Treizième technology and Valhallan, the architecture of the République versus that of the Commonwealth, but because he'd never actually seen a planet surface at all, never seen that many people, never had his calves sniffed by a curious Valhallan hound, never seen a horse up close, so close he could reach out and touch its mane. They walked past low stone buildings housing swordsmiths or jewellers, past the doors of long halls where the smell of cooking meat wafted out from the doors in mouthwatering waves, tall residential blocks, tailors, bootmakers, markets full of strange-looking vegetables that Treize couldn't place at all. It was wonderful. He had no idea what he was doing there.

Eiður produced his ID from his coat pocket and waved it over the payment pad to buy Treize an apple freshly arrived from the orchards on Vahöll that he pocketed for later. When they went back up to the lab, Treize took off the coat and his boots and washed the apple in their kitchenette, and Eiður cut it into thick slices with a knife he drew from a sheath hidden inside his coat. When they ate it, sitting on the thick wool rug around the low wooden table in their living space, Treize's back pressed up to the side of the couch and Eiður's long legs stretched out under the table, the pieces were juicy and sweet and not quite like anything Treize had ever tasted before. The food he'd had on the ship before his arrival had been synthetic, like all Treizième food. And apparently the Valhallans didn't think much of their captive scientist, because the food they'd served him for the past twelve years had been nothing to compare with that one fresh apple.

"Good?" Eiður asked, when they were done, cleaning the sticky juice off their fingers with warm damp cloths. 

"It was the best thing I've ever tasted," Treize replied, quite earnestly. 

Eiður grinned. "I know the food they serve here's fucking awful but the apple wasn't _that_ good," he said, and patted his mouth indelicately with the cloth in his hand. "Next time, I'll buy you two."

Next time he _did_ buy two, and a handful of other fruits Treize didn't recognise at all. One was so bitter that he spat it out into his hands just as soon as he'd put it in his mouth while Eiður chuckled, and one was so sweet and sticky that it felt like what Treize imagined it would be like to eat sugar syrup with a spoon. Eiður joined in, even having a couple of bites of the ones he already knew he disliked - just to share the experience, he said. It hadn't been something Treize had wanted, but it wasn't exactly something he regretted. Not at all. Perhaps he just hadn't known to want it in the first place, and so he thanked him for it, and he meant it. 

"I think we more or less owe it to you," Eiður replied, cleaning the sugary juice from his callused fingertips. "From what I can tell, Fólkvangr gave you a fucking disgraceful welcome." He leaned forward to put his plate down on the table. "If I were you, I'd've left by now." 

"Well, I don't think I'd have got far," Treize said. "I mean, I was sent here with a job to do. And besides which, I can't even pilot a ship that's not Treizième." 

"They didn't teach you?"

"They fill us with all kinds of skills before we're born," Treize said. "But I suppose they didn't think I'd ever need to fly a Valhallan starship."

"But you could learn, right?"

Treize shrugged faintly, then deposited his own plate on the table. "I don't see why not," he said, his mouth still tasting sticky-sweet with fruit juice. "But I also don't see why I would if I'm not planning to leave."

"Haven't you ever wanted to learn to do something just because you could?"

"I haven't really had the time to think about it."

Eiður toyed with his beard braids thoughtfully. 

"Next time we go out, I'm going to teach you something," he said, the look on his face almost mischievous. 

Treize found he looked forward to it, though he wished he didn't; Eiður was his custodian, not his friend, and certainly not his lover.

He looked forward to it nonetheless.

\---

Three days passed before they went out again. 

They were three productive days, because Treize had discovered their little outings had actually served to sharpen his mind instead of dulling its edge the way he'd imagined they might, given him a new, closer, clearer focus where he'd thought before that his focus had been perfectly adequate. Perhaps it had been, but nonetheless he saw a marked improvement in his work, and there was Eiður, assisting, standing by in a pair of disposable gloves and a sensible Treizième jumpsuit that Treize was sure some poor soul in the fashion districts on Ventôse must have had to make to order for his size. He looked ridiculous in it, the shiny black fabric completely out of place with his long hair and braided beard and tough Valhallan boots, but the work didn't care what Eiður looked like doing it and neither did Treize. It was good work. They made progress.

When three days had very nearly passed, at an hour or so after lunch, Eiður smiled that faint, mischievous smile and said, "I think that's enough for today, don't you?"

They were, in fact, at a sensible enough juncture to break from the work, and Treize knew Eiður knew that just as well as he did. So, they changed out of their lab clothes and passed the guards at the door who, honestly, had become significantly less surly in what had been quite a short space of time. They took the stairs down into the wide stone corridors on the ground level and wound their way through them to the exit where they paused briefly so Treize could fasten up his coat. Then they walked side-by-side down the street outside, turned at the corner, took quite a different route to the ones they'd taken before, past a blacksmith's shop with waves of heat rolling out through its open doors, past a leatherworker's shop selling finely-worked horse tack and leather riding gloves. The Valhallans had stuck with older ways, clothes often tailored to the individual's own measurements, footwear made from lasts that sat in racks in the bootmakers' storerooms, everything made to weather several winters and even then they'd likely only need repairs and not replacements, but there were still some items made to pick up out of the rack and wear. They found a pair of leather gloves in the leatherworker's shop that fit Treize quite well, though Treize didn't see the need for them. Then Eiður ordered a pair to be made for him too, had the proprietor take measurements and note that they could be collected in a week or so, and Eiður waved his ID at the paypad before they left. This time they really were gifts, more than the coat had been, more than the fruit had been. Treize felt oddly awkward, oddly obliged. 

"Do I really need gloves?" Treize asked even though he'd really meant to thank him, because he'd done fairly well just tucking his hands into the fur-lined pockets of his maybe-not-borrowed coat before that. Still, he was pulling them on in the street outside the shop as he said it. 

"Yes, you really need gloves," Eiður replied, and refrained from explaining any further. He always did enjoy a mystery on occasion.

The first city of Fólkvangr in which they were walking was named Sessrúmnir, and it stood on one bank of a vast lake. Brísingamen, the planet's second city, stood on the opposite shore. Eiður said in the summer there were boats on the lake, fishing, swimming, rowing, sailing for the fun of it, but all through the long winter the lake was frozen over solidly. The lake was where they went then, down the hill, winding through the streets that had no particular sense to their orientations and relations the way cities were structured on the Treizième worlds, seeming instead to have grown organically with no real plan at all. And there, by the edge of the grown stone pier at the edge of the lake, people were skating on the ice. 

"No," Treize said as he watched them glide on their slim metal blades. 

Eiður smiled. "Yes," he replied. And perhaps if Treize had actually meant it they wouldn't have done it, perhaps if he'd really objected he would've sat himself down and watched instead, but they ended up strapping on skates on stone benches by the edge of the ice despite his initial weak protest. By the end, he wasn't even particularly sorry that he'd been persuaded, only that he'd been persuaded so easily.

Eiður was good at it. Treize supposed if he came from Þruðvangr then he'd have needed to be, given that their planet's surface was frozen like a kind of winter wasteland for the vast majority of the year. He skated out onto the ice in a pair of boots he'd borrowed from the little kiosk on the pier almost like he wasn't even thinking about it, turned backwards with a smile on his face and gestured for Treize to follow him, to join him. He followed, tentatively, slipped within three feet and skidded, almost fell with a sick lurch of his stomach. Eiður didn't move to steady him. 

"Don't be afraid to fall," Eiður said. "The ice won't crack."

"And what if _I_ do?" Treize asked. 

Eiður grinned. "Well, you'll mend," he said. "We live in a medical centre, Treize. And you'll have learned something."

He showed him what to do, demonstrated the procedure slowly so Treize could break it down to its component parts and, equally slowly, start to replicate it. He was hesitant at first, still scared he'd fall until Eiður sighed and shook his head and gave him a nudge that was just enough for him to slip and fall straight down to his knees. He yelped as he went down and looked up with a frown from his knees on the ice and Eiður stood there, hands on hips, even taller than usual in his skates, though in the end he held down one hand to him. 

"What was that for?" Treize asked as he took his hand, noting that at least he understood why he'd needed the gloves. They'd cushioned his hands against the ice. 

"You were always going to be scared to fall till you fell," Eiður said, and hauled him back up to his feet, then steadied him with his hands at his shoulders. "You survived, didn't you?" Treize gave a grudging sort of grimace of acknowledgement. "Good. So push. See how far you can go. Go _too far_. Have fun, for fuck's sake, all that'll happen if you fall down is you'll get back up. It's not like we're standing on a ledge, you don't need me to keep you upright." 

"That's easy for you to say," Treize said. "You can already do it."

Eiður tutted in mock disapproval. "Do you have any idea how many times I hit the ice when I was learning?" He shook his head sadly, as if recalling all of those times. "It was a lot. And I mean _a lot_. And sometimes I still fall. Fuck, sometimes I fall on purpose just because I can." And he skated away, calling, "Follow me!" back over his shoulder. So Treize followed, perhaps even a little less hesitantly. Eiður was an odd teacher. 

In the end, he fell more times than he could count, or rather in the end he stopped counting the times. Eiður skated around him in tricky little circles, his long leather coat abandoned at the pier, turning this way and that with a speed and a strange kind of grace that Treize wasn't sure a man of his size should have possessed. And Treize followed, broke down the steps in his head with his perfect recall and followed them, let Eiður's hands settle at his waist as he showed him how to turn, how to cross one skate in front of the other, how to shift to the opposite edge of his blade, then how to do it all while going backwards. They were there for over an hour, nearly two, maybe more than two since neither one of them was watching the time and it seemed to pass so strangely, Eiður laughing and Treize smiling, the two of them collapsing in a heap more than once, breathless, much to the other skaters' amusement. Treize understood; it really didn't matter if he fell because he got back up and kept going. It was like his work, in a way, because every failure meant another dataset to build upon; perhaps Eiður's methods were odd but maybe he knew what he was doing after all.

They went into one of the vast stone halls on the way back, paid for their food and drink at the door then sat down at one of the long stone tables. There was hot meat on plates to carve from, vegetables, fruits, flavoured wine, ale, mugs of chilled water that Eiður told him they pumped down from the mountains where the water was purest, the way they did on Þruðvangr. There were men and women there, some children with them, the place full of chatter with some suspiciously drunken-sounding singing emanating from one corner, and they ate, the food absolutely like nothing Treize had ever tasted. They'd stopped eating meat in the Treizième centuries ago when they'd ceased the use of animal products altogether, no leather, no milk, nothing at all. Then they'd stopped cultivating plants to eat, too. They all lived on synthesised food instead, drank no alcohol, ate no meat and called it civilised, which perhaps it was in its way. None of the Loïcs understood how the Valhallans could call themselves lovers of nature while they raised animals for slaughter but Treize could see why the Valhallans hadn't followed the Treizème's example: the Treizième had tried to distance themselves from nature and had perhaps lost some of their understanding because of that, and the Valhallans lived their lives in the midst of it. Treize wasn't sure if one way was better than the other, necessarily, but they were certainly very different approaches.

"I think it used to be like this on Earth," Eiður said, as they ate from metal plates and drank from metal mugs amidst the cacophony of noises that were more than Treize had ever heard at once. He gestured around the hall with his tankard. "Don't you think it was like this, once?"

He sounded hopeful but Treize had no idea because if there was one part of his in vitro education that had lacked the most, it was history. The Loïcs had never really needed it, so the Célestes said when they'd described the parameters for their creation, but he found himself oddly intrigued.

They spoke with other people at the table, two older military men with Vallhöll accents and commanders' rings around their wrists that matched Eiður's own when they compared them over the tabletop, a man and a woman who were roughly Eiður and Treize's physical age who worked at the medical centre several floors up from Treize's lab, a girl of about eighteen who served them wine and said her family owned the hall they were all eating in. Eiður told them Treize was the one who'd developed the treatment for Thor's Virus and the medical man, a pharmacist with steel-rimmed pince-nez glasses perched on his nose, clapped Treize on the back in thanks as they all raised a glass in his honour. 

"No one's ever thanked me before," Treize said to Eiður as they left, and Eiður shook his head sadly, snow gathering in his hair. 

"That's because Hallmar's a taciturn old bastard and the government tried to act like it was a Valhallan who came up with it," he said, as they walked. "You know, it was Hallmar who told them they couldn't say it wasn't you. He might be an old bastard and he might hate the Treizième but he sure as fuck won't stomach a lie."

It was an interesting thought, and one that occupied Treize's mind almost entirely for their winding walk back to the lab. Eiður talked, and he heard him, but his mind was for the most part elsewhere. Sometimes people really weren't quite what they seemed. Apparently, Hallmar hadn't been. He had to wonder if Eiður was.

It was late by the time they returned and Treize went to the shower when they were back inside with the door locked behind them. His muscles ached from the falls and from exertion but the hot water helped and while he usually tried not to be wasteful, even though he knew the used water sluiced away for treatment and reuse, he bowed his head and leaned against the rough stone wall and took another five minutes, another ten. He'd never really taken the time to think about how the water felt on his skin before, how it soothed his aches, how the towel felt when he dried himself, how it felt to stretch his tired limbs this way and that before he pulled on his black and white Treizième pyjamas and climbed into his Valhallan bed. There were a lot of things he'd never have thought to experience had Hallmar remained and Eiður never come. He wasn't sure if he should thank him for it or wish they'd never met. 

He already had his transceiver in his hand ready to press into place when he heard it. It was just a faint sound, not really loud enough for him to place in terms of source or location, not like the Sylvies and Oliviers who were born deaf and given implants far more accurate than a human ear, their equivalent of the Loïcs' glasses. He paused, then he heard it again, still faint but he certainly hadn't imagined it. He wasn't sure what might have been located at the other side of the lab's thick walls, or indeed on the floor above them, but he'd heard nothing at all from outside in twelve years so logically assumed the noise was inside and that, of course, meant Eiður. So he put down his transceiver, he put on his glasses and he left the room. 

He heard it again by Eiður's door, a low sound, not a word, nothing coherent in any language Treize knew and they'd given him standard Mandar and several of the more widely-spoken Indusian languages in addition to Treizième and Valhallan. So he put his hand on the handle of the door to Eiður's room and turned it slowly, pushed it quietly, and peeked inside. 

Thanks to his glasses and their neural interface, what he saw hit him quickly and in an embarrassed flash he understood the situation. Eiður was kneeling on his fur-covered bed, naked and flushed, sitting on his heels. Eiður's head hung back, eyes closed, the ends of his long braid hanging so low they almost brushed against the fur bedspread. His knees were spread wide and his cock jutted up huge and hard from between his thighs with one of his big hands wrapped tight around it. When Treize heard the sound again, it was a bitten-off almost-moan as Eiður stroked himself and Treize saw it all in his perfect enhanced vision, with his perfect recall, in the cover of the dark from the doorway. He was horrified. He was horrified and he was was absolutely enthralled. 

He closed the door again as quietly as he could and fled back to his own room, the image still bright in his brain. And when he closed his own door, when he leaned back against it, he could feel his own cock beginning to harden against the flimsy fabric of his pyjamas. He hadn't meant to see what he'd seen. He suspected he'd have been better off if he hadn't. But when he went back to bed, he took off his glasses and deactivated the interface so the other Loïcs wouldn't see it when he touched himself. He didn't want them to know. Cinq would have needled him good-naturedly until he'd admitted he imagined the hand around his cock was Eiður's. 

Eiður's hands on him were precisely what he imagined. He didn't know how not to be dismayed by it, but that didn't mean he stopped.

\---

For the following week, work progressed, and for the following week, Treize was even quieter than usual. Of course, Eiður spoke more than enough for the two of them, and he somehow seemed not to notice the change at all. Treize wished Hallmar had stayed. Everything had been so much simpler then.

And then, at night, Treize listened though he tried hard not to. He listened and he waited and he heard the sounds that Eiður made in his room next door, low moans that he surely couldn't have expected Treize would hear. He tried to pretend it didn't bother him, tried to fool himself into believing that he had no interest, but the second night he left his bed and opened Eiður's door again, and he saw him in the dark just like he had the night before. He only stayed there for a few short seconds but that was more than enough to capture the image of him, his head hanging forward this time as he squeezed his balls with one hand and the head of his cock with the other. Treize came minutes later, on his knees just like Eiður was, back in his room with his glasses off so no one else could see. 

The next night, the sound was louder. He'd told himself he wouldn't go, that he'd stay in bed and put in his transceiver and deal with Cinq's questions and Neuf's steady, predictable indifference, but he left his room and he found the door to Eiður's room unlatched this time and when he inched it open, there he was again. He was on his knees but leaning forward on one hand this time, with the other hand around his cock, his long braid hanging down over his shoulder. His breath was catching with that low half-moan, his fingers pressing tight to the fur bedspread there beneath his palm. And all Treize could do was pull the door to, leave it ajar just like he'd found it and return to his own room with his cock already half-hard from it; all he could do was turn off his glasses and abandon them on the table by the bed and stroke himself, almost too hard, almost too fast, his free hand clamped down over his mouth so he wouldn't make a sound. None of the other Loïcs had ever met a man like Eiður Oláfsson. 

"You should stay and watch," Cinq told him, later, lounging on his couch inside the link. "He probably wants you to. Why do you think the door was open this time?"

Treize grimaced. "He doesn't want me to," he said, just a shade away from tetchily. "He's my _custodian_. He probably did something that irritated the Admiralty and got himself assigned to the lab, and there's probably a woman that he misses on Þruðvangr and he's thinking about her." 

"Maybe he's married," Neuf added, not quite helpfully, and Cinq made a rather impolite, dismissive gesture in his direction. It was hardly the first time that had happened over the years. 

"Ignore the wet blanket," Cinq said. "He's not married. Do you really think there's any way you've listened to him talk for so long and he's not even hinted at having a wife? I bet there's next to nothing he's not told you."

"And what if I'm not interested in him?"

Neuf sighed in near-exasperation. "You've been watching him masturbate, Treize," he said. "Don't be an idiot. You're interested in him."

"And even if you aren't," Cinq said, smiling brightly, "think of those of those of us who want to live vicariously."

As expected, Cinq and Neuf were not help to him at all.

The following night, he heard him again. And again, he left his bed and he left his room and he went to Eiður's door, eased it open just far enough to see. He was on his knees but bent forward this time, bent low, one forearm on the mattress with his forehead resting down against it and his other hand around his cock. Treize watched from the door, watched the way his back arched, the way the muscles in his thighs flexed, how he gripped his balls for a moment then took his cock in hand again, with a low moan that he muffled unsuccessfully against the fur bedspread. Treize went back to his room and left his own door ajar so he could hear the sounds that Eiður made quite clearly as he stroked himself, too. The difference was, Treize kept quiet. He wished Eiður had, too. He wished he'd stop, and then again he didn't.

It was the same the night after that and the night after that. They worked together in the daytime and Treize found it increasingly difficult to look Eiður in the eye, to even look in his direction, though he supposed his glasses meant it was hard Eiður him to tell if Treize was looking at him at all. They worked together in the day, making progress, steady progress but Treize was quite sure it really was progress nonetheless, and then they ate dinner together in their living space above the lab and Eiður told his stories, about the times he'd landed on Indusian planets, bathing in the waterfalls on Brahmaputra, getting caught unexpectedly in the monsoon on Indus Prime, how much trouble his commanding officers had had with the pronunciation of the Ravin language and how that had led to so many misunderstandings, back when he'd been just a lieutenant and not a commander. Treize liked to listen, though he almost dreaded the moment it was time for them to make their way to bed. 

He watched him from the doorway, night on night. He watched him on his knees, watched him on his back with his feet pressed to the mattress and his cock in his hand, watched him bending over the foot of the bed. He watched him in stolen glances from the doorway Eiður left ajar then stole away back to his own room and made himself come with those images still in his head. He started thinking of Eiður's hands on him, started creating strange little fantasies like he'd never thought to have before, constructing them from pieces of memories that weren't his at all mixed with pieces that were. He saw Premier with Magalie 14's mouth on him in her office on Brumaire. He saw Trois with Anaïs 69204, having sex in a medical bay by his lab on Thermidor. He saw all the things the others had ever done.

He saw Neuf with Jérôme Premier, Neuf's hands on Premier's chest, at his jaw, at his hipbones, at his cock. He saw Neuf's fingers tease Premier open, saw him slick himself, saw him push the whole length of his erection deep inside him. Treize wondered what that felt like, though he wished he didn't. As he touched himself, he imagined doing that to Eiður, thought about wrapping his long hair around his wrist, about pushing into him on his knees in Eiður's bed. As he touched himself, he thought about putting his mouth on him. As he came, he thought about Eiður over him, in him, just like Neuf let Jérôme Premier do sometimes. He seemed to like it. Treize wondered if he would, too, though he was left completely aghast by the thought.

On the eighth day, they stopped by the leatherworker's shop to pick up the gloves Eiður had ordered for him, and then they walked down to the lake, though Treize had very nearly balked at the idea of another outing. They borrowed skates again but they didn't stay there by the pier like they'd done before; they stepped down to the ice from the other side of the pier instead, their usual footwear strung over their shoulders by the laces, and Eiður led him out, skating in long, easy strides for twenty minutes, thirty, thirty-five. An island came up on the ice-white horizon out there, low and so entirely covered in snow that for a start it just looked like an oddly gathered snow drift, but there were small, hardy trees still growing there, evergreens that looked just like they'd been dusted with sugar, like the sweet treats they'd seen in the food hall once they'd finished with their meats. 

"I think Earth was a lot like this," Eiður said, as they brushed a patch of the snowy dock till it was clear enough to sit down on and then took off their skates, put their shoes back on. "My uncle Böðvar moved to Sessrúmnir when I was eight. We spent a lot of autumns here, because that's the time when it's coldest on Þruðvangr and no one really wants to be there unless they have to. This lake starts to freeze in autumn and I skated out here with two of my sisters though Uncle Böðvar said no." 

He paused and pulled himself up, and leaned against a convenient tree with his arms crossed over his chest, looking down at Treize. "I went through the ice just down there," he said, and pointed so Treize followed the line of it, looked down at the ice by the edge of the dock. "I almost drowned, but my sisters dragged me out in time." 

Treize left his skates on the stone dock and stood up, moved over to him with boots crunching on the snow, watched him as he turned to lead the way onto the island. 

"On Þruðvangr, the lake only thaws forty days in the year, so I thought it must be like that here," Eiður said. "It's not. That's how I learned all worlds' rules are different."

They walked the island for an hour, ducking between trees that scratched at the leather of their coats and caught at Eiður's hair, though it was small and easily covered in much less time than that. It turned out Eiður's uncle Böðvar still owned the island, and the small stone hall that stood there on it, that they went inside, was his summer home where Eiður had spent parts of his childhood. They lit a fire in the living room and warmed themselves by it for a while, then Eiður quenched the flames and they made their way back across the ice to the city, to the busy streets, to the building in which they both lived, that Eiður had called home for perhaps two months by then though Treize couldn't say he'd kept count. They ate dinner together, spent an hour in the lab decanting samples after that, and then it was finally time to head to their beds. Treize ached down to his bones from the walking and the skating and the inevitable slipping and falling, and he looked forward to sleep. But, of course, he didn't sleep, at least not quickly. 

He could hear Eiður. He'd given up the pretence that he wouldn't go to see and so after the first few minutes he did just that. He left his bed and went to Eiður's door in the dark and he found the door was flung wide open, found he didn't even have to lay a finger on it. There Eiður was, his knees spread wide just like they'd been the first night, his head flung back, back arched, lips parted, cock in hand. He watched him from the doorway, watched the way the muscles worked beneath his skin, how his shoulders tensed and then relaxed, how he eased back his foreskin then pinched it tight over the tip and made his breath catch with it. He watched him for longer than he ever had, far longer, watched him with his own hand straying down to the waist of his pyjamas, with the heel of his hand pressed to his erection. 

Then he touched himself. He didn't really mean to but it happened before he could think to stop it, his fingers dipping down inside his pyjamas, wrapping around his cock, stroking as he watched, slow and quiet. He watched Eiður's breath quicken. He watched his movements tighten and stiffen just like his muscles did. He watched his skin flush, watched his free hand clutch the bedspread, watched his hips jerk and buck and watched him come over his fingers with a hitching groan he'd never heard him make before. And Treize came, too, still tucked into his pyjamas, his free hand clamped down hard over his mouth to keep him quiet, so Eiður wouldn't hear. So Eiður wouldn't know he was there at all.

Then, when Eiður had wiped himself off and gone to sleep, Treize slipped back into his room and went to sleep, too. He went into the link.

"You're ridiculous," Neuf told him. 

"I agree with him for once," Cinq said. "And you know if Trois or Premier were here, they'd agree too."

"Just tell him you're interested in him," Neuf said. "It worked quite well for me with Jérôme Premier."

"I don't think it works like that for Valhallans." Treize frowned, irritated, consternated. "Honestly, I'm not sure it usually works like that for most Treizième, either."

Cinq tutted. "You don't know the first thing about Valhallans."

"And neither do either of you!"

Neuf shrugged. "Apparently we know more than you do."

There wasn't really much more to say after that and so he kept quiet and finally, Cinq and Neuf moved back into prodding at each other's lives and not at Treize's. Still, he knew something had to change. Maybe, he thought, he could persuade himself to dismiss his fantasies and keep to his bed at night. Maybe, he thought, he could concentrate on his work. Maybe, he thought, he could request a new custodian. 

He was scared they'd say no. But mostly, he was scared they wouldn't. 

\---

In the morning, Eiður woke him. 

Treize blinked his eyes open as oddly familiar hands nudged at his shoulders, though obviously he saw absolutely nothing at all when he did so. Frankly, most of the time he had no particular reason to open his eyes at all, considering that the interface from his glasses flooded images and associated data directly into his brain, and the hands at his shoulders went still then pulled back. 

"Oh," Eiður said, and Treize could only surmise that the stark, block white of his eyes had come as a shock. "You really _are_ blind without the glasses." 

Treize smiled wryly and sat himself up in bed. Then he disengaged the transceiver from the base of his skull, reached over to the table by the bedside and fumbled for his glasses. 

"It really wasn't an exaggeration," he said, slipping the glasses on and activating them. "We're engineered this way." When his vision came online, Eiður was standing there by the bed exhibiting his usual devil-may-care approach to pyjama wear, the waistband of the trousers barely clinging to his hips. "Sorry, did you want something?"

"Well, the Admiralty's agreed to let me spend Þórr's Day on Þruðvangr," Eiður said. "That's in two days so I'll be leaving this morning to get there in time." 

Treize nodded. "Thanks for not just disappearing," he said. "That's a lot more than Hallmar ever did." 

"No problem," Eiður said and he made for the door, but he stopped in the doorway and turned back with that mischievous smile on his face, the one Treize had seen so many times by then. "Oh, yeah. Did I forget to say you're coming with me?" he said, not at all like that particular point had only just sprung to mind. It was fortunate he was military and not an actor. "I cleared it with the Admiralty a couple of days ago. Put some clothes on, we're leaving in an hour."

A military hovercar took the two of them away an hour later, Treize still reeling with the notion that he was really leaving Fólkvangr. They sped through the streets, rounding corners at speeds Treize had never experienced and Eiður chucked him under the chin and told him he might want to put on his seatbelt, just in case. They arrived at the Sessrúmnir spaceport perhaps twenty minutes later, just outside the city on a plain before the hills began to rise, and Eiður pulled himself up straight once they were out of the car and inside the hangar. Treize had never seen him look so serious or commanding or just so much like his rank really meant something as he did then, as he pulled up his sleeves to show his commanders' rings to the attendants. 

"Commander," said the guard, as he opened the gate for the two of them, and Eiður walked Treize through. Then he pulled out a pin from his hip pocket that he secured to the collar of his leather coat, three broad silver stripes inside a bright gold rectangle that would likely show his rank with a lot more ease than rolling up his sleeves. They stepped onto the transport as Eiður was still pushing and pulling it into place through his thick leather collar and the doors closed with a hiss; ten minutes later they took off; twenty minutes after that, they were sweeping into the open transport bay of one of the Valhallan fleet's two twin flagships. They boarded _Muninn_ , Eiður explaining absently that _Huginn_ was stationed in orbit around Valhöll. 

They watched Fólkvangr from a viewport near the transport bay, its blues and greens and whites and swaths of swirling cloud like an image Eiður had shown him of Earth before the exodus. It shrank away quickly as the sub-light drives engaged and they watched it fade into the distance even before the hyperdrives came online, Treize's hands on the glass, Eiður's shoulder tucked behind his, standing close. He always stood close. Treize wished he'd move away, wished he could move away himself, but neither thing happened and so there they stood.

"Have you been on board this ship before?" Treize asked, once Fólkvangr was just a speck in the distance, tiny though his glasses could still identify it amongst the stars. Then the hyperdrives punched them through into hyperspace and there was nothing to see through the viewport except a kind of haze that his glasses couldn't parse; he wondered what other people saw in hyperspace, but he didn't ask.

"I served on Huginn for a couple of years," Eiður replied. "Apparently Muninn's exactly the same down to the last bolt in the last bulkhead, but I bet we can find some differences. Let me show you around."

The ship was huge, like a city racing through space, full of huge bays full of sub-light fighter craft and narrow corridors that led between large halls, men and women bustling by each other wearing pins at their collars, most with rings tattooed around their wrists. Filled and unfilled rings were for the commissioned officers and rings with stripes were for the non-commissioned, Eiður told him, though Treize already knew that much about the Valhallan military at the very least. What he didn't know was that if they were stripped of their rank, they were stripped of their tattoos, too; Eiður told him he'd seen it done once, a two-ring lieutenant who'd had one of those rings cut straight out of his skin. There was more blood than he'd expected, he said, dripping all over the floor while the lieutenant passed out, but the medics had managed to regenerate his skin quite quickly and within two years he'd had a new ring tattooed on his new skin. It didn't happen often, but it did happen.

They ate in a cafeteria clearly geared more toward the ship's civilian crew members and to its passengers than to officers, then Eiður found a computer kiosk to query where the two of them would find their quarters. They'd been assigned one room between them, which didn't seem to surprise Eiður in the slightest, and he led the way to the passenger section toward the top of the ship. In battle, Muninn's shields would draw tight across the hull and the passengers would evacuate in toward the centre, their quarters serving as a layer of non-essential insulation between enemy fire and the ship's essential functions, but Muninn hadn't seen a battle in years. The firepower of even the lesser Valhallan battleships was just too great for any military to defeat, maybe even the Treizième's, and they hadn't tried to test it. The Valhallan ships were faster than any others, too, both in hyperspace and out of it, making the trip from Fólkvangr to distant Þruðvangr in less than thirty-six hours where the same distance would have taken a whole fortnight for Treizième ships.

There were two single beds in their assigned quarters where they were scheduled to spend the night. Eiður hung his sword from the hook by his bed that seemed designed for that very purpose and dropped his bag to the floor and then he stripped right then and there, took off his coat and his boots and his tunic, pulled off his leather trousers and the long underwear he wore beneath till he was utterly naked, talking all the while, completely unselfconscious. Then he showered with the door into the little bathroom propped wide open so he could keep on talking over the noise of the spray and Treize tried not to watch him. When he showered after, Eiður loitered in the doorway, still naked and towelling his hair as he continued to talk. Treize wasn't sure if he should be mortified or strangely aroused but while he wanted to be neither, he found he was a combination of both. 

Then they went to bed and turned out the light and Treize took off his glasses, deactivated the interface. He didn't need to see Eiður on the other bed just feet away, his pyjamas pushed down over his hips. He didn't need to see him with one hand clamped tight over his mouth and one hand around his cock. He already had the image in his head. 

He didn't touch himself. He wished he didn't want to.

\---

On Þruðvangr, five sixths of the year are perpetual night and the other sixth is daylight. The day the sun comes up on the horizon, peeks out from behind Þruðvangr's largest moon and rises over the mountains outside the city of Bilskírnir, is named Þórr's Day, because it starts with a crackle of lightning and an almighty crack of thunder that's like the god's come home with the sunlight. 

Þruðvangr looked almost entirely white from space as the transport left Muninn and began its descent, and though Eiður stayed just as close to him as ever, his expression was as closed and hard as Hallmar's ever had been. And when they disembarked, when the door opened and Eiður led him down the gangway onto the planet outside, the cold hit like a hammer. Treize didn't shiver, he just cringed. Even Eiður pulled on a pair of gloves against it. 

"How long has it been since you were here last?" Treize asked him, as they walked through into the complex and away from the hangar. 

"I try to come back every year for Þórr's Day," Eiður replied. "Service permitting." And, uncharacteristically, he said nothing more about it. His manner was odd. If Treize hadn't known better, he'd have said he was nervous.

The stone streets of Þruðvangr outside were so slick with ice that they pulled on small nets of spikes over their boots so they could walk on it. Eiður gave Treize a fur-lined hood to cover his head and his mouth and his nose that he was more than grateful to take, especially as almost everyone they passed was also wearing one. He'd already taken two full sets of Valhallan clothing that Eiður had given him back up on board Muninn, since his Treizième clothes wouldn't be close to warm enough, though he'd tried hard to decline since he had no way at all to repay him. It turned out he was glad of the leather trousers, the leather boots, the woollen tunics, because somehow he hadn't anticipated how cold the planet would feel. 

The ends of Eiður's hair stuck out from the bottom of his hood as they walked down the street lined with flickering torches and they started to gather drops of ice that he brushed away with one gloved hand before he tucked the hair away, muttering something about that being how he'd lost six inches off the end the last time. It wasn't cold enough to break off his hair, not so soon before Þórr's Day, but Treize felt like it might be close to it. 

"Where are we going?" Treize asked, his voice muffled by the hood, though Eiður evidently heard him anyway. 

"My parents' house," he replied, and flagged down a sled pulled by six great shaggy hounds that stood almost as tall as Treize's chest. 

They climbed in and Eiður leaned forward to murmur something to the driver that Treize couldn't quite hear, then they took off through the icy streets and then out of the the city, past the limits of the flickering lights, through the dark, through the snow. Treize could see out into it by virtue of his glasses, out toward the mountains, and saw a town of little low stone halls there by the frozen river that ran into a great frozen lake. And in the town there was a taller hall, grown stone, like a castle on Earth from the books Loïc Trois had found in the archives once on Thermidor. That was where they headed to, perhaps twenty minutes' ride outside the city, where the sled stopped and Eiður swiped his ID over a frosty paypad in payment. He sent the driver and his hounds to the kennels for food and water and rest before they'd return to Bilskírnir. 

They went inside, through a pair of towering, heavy wooden doors. They took off their boot spikes and their hoods and their coats. Then Eiður gave Treize a strange, unreadable look, and they went through into a vestibule, then through into the massive hall beyond. 

"Oh, it's you!" a woman called from between the empty stone benches. She was tall and broad and blonde just like Eiður was and loped over to sweep him into a hug. "We didn't know if you'd make it. I'll let dad know you're here." Then she dashed away, her long blonde braid swinging behind her. 

"My sister Halla," Eiður explained, gesturing after her. "She's...enthusiastic." But Treize frowned behind his glasses. 

"I know where we are," he said, because suddenly the things he'd seen and heard, since the time he'd met Eiður and since they'd arrived there on Þruðvangr, clicked into place and made sense. "Your father's Oláf Sigmarsson. You're the chieftain's son." Eiður did something caught directly between smiling and wincing, then he nodded tightly, awkwardly. It was a very strange look on him. "Why didn't you say something?"

Eiður shrugged. "I'm the ninth of nine kids," he said. "It's really not that important." And he left it at that as a flood of people all spilled into the room at once. Treize wasn't entirely sure what else he'd wanted him to say anyway.

Treize watched as they gathered around, all smiles and hugs and teasing shoulder-barges. Some were Eiður's siblings, he supposed, like Halla who'd returned with a blonde-haired toddler on her hip, like the two older men who might've been his brothers judging by the similarities Treize saw in their faces and expressions. Another man was taller, all gangly limbs and towering over the others, and he ruffled Eiður's hair and made him scowl though he was smiling with it. Two women grinned and fussed his hair back into place and there were children everywhere, running, climbing on the benches, tugging at tunic hems, one huge family like nothing Treize had ever seen. He stood apart, the obvious outsider.

"And who's your friend?" asked Halla, quirking her blonde brows at Treize when the frenzy of greetings had finally died down. 

Eiður went over to him, tucked one arm behind him, and settled one hand at the small of Treize's back. 

"This is Loïc Treize," he said, oddly serious. "He's the one who came up with the treatment. The one who's working on a cure." 

The gaiety amongst them all died down and Halla clasped Treize by his shoulders, her expression solemn, very close to intense. She was taller than Treize by a good four inches, older than he was or Eiður was with grey in her blonde hair but her hands were strong, and she was beautiful if worn around the edges. Judging by the others there around them, that was something of a common trait in the Þruðvangr Valhallans. She looked him in the eye and Treize could have sworn she could see straight through his glasses, like her bright blue eyes bored straight inside him, down to his beating heart. 

"Treize," she said, her hands tight at his arms. "I'm Halla Oláfsdóttir. Welcome to our home." 

The way she said it seemed oddly official and when Eiður stole him aside for a moment afterwards, he told him that it was. Halla was the eldest of the chieftain's children and their father's heir, and the welcome she extended bound all others beneath their roof to welcome Treize there, too. Eiður seemed strangely convinced that they'd have welcomed him anyway, though it was a mystery whether that assumption was a product of Treizième trade with Þruðvangr or Treize's work or something else entirely. 

It was Halla who showed him around while Eiður's brothers and sisters and nieces and nephews, uncles and aunts and various spouses and cousins and members of their vast extended family begged for stories of life in the stars outside Þruðvangr. Halla took him out of the great hall, away from the tables they were preparing for the Þórr's Day feast, down corridors past audience rooms and official spaces while she explained that their family's home served as the chieftain's official seat of power, too. Then they passed a guard with a long sword at his shoulder and a gun at his waist and went into the family residences beyond. 

There were small offshoots down stone corridors for each of the households, Treize found, like little halls in their own right dotted across the different floors, reaching down into subterranean levels that delved into the rock below, extending out into the town that surrounded them. There were eight vast floors to the place settled there above the ground and Halla said there were over a hundred members of the family who lived there, with space to spare for more who might arrive for Þórr's Day, or perhaps for more new households. Their ancestors had been the first of the stone-growers, Halla said, and over the years they'd perfected the technique to build this place and the town and their cities. They could trace their family line directly all the way back to Earth before the exodus, all their names woven into a vast, ancient tapestry that hung from the wall in their great hall. Treize had seen it. It was fixed there in his head and as they walked, he could flick his memory across it to search out Eiður's name.

"I think you must be a good man," Halla said, as they paused by the door that led back into the hall once the tour was completed. "So's my brother." 

Treize nodded. "He is," he replied. "I've not known many people, if I'm honest, but I really think he is. And you have a beautiful home." 

Halla smiled. "I like you a lot more than the last one he brought home with him," she said, with a shake of her head that probably accompanied a memory Treize wasn't sure he wanted to hear about. "Get him to take you to Himinbjörg. It might be enlightening."

And she went back into the hall and left him there. At length, he followed; Eiður looked up with a smile.

\---

Later, once they'd had food forced upon them even though they both protested they weren't hungry, Eiður led the way back into the residences and up a winding stone staircase, up into a tower. The room at the top was tall and square with thick, dense wood shutters closed across the small slit windows both inside the tower and out, against the cold. There were tapestries hanging from the grown stone walls, a wolf on one, an image of Earth sewn into the other, huge and blue. 

"You grew up here?" Treize asked, as Eiður pulled himself up to sit on top of a stout wooden dresser, his heels striking the drawers of it as he swung his legs. 

"Until my eighteenth year," Eiður replied. "Then I joined the military." He smiled wryly. "I'm thirty-two years old. I don't think I ever told you."

Treize shrugged faintly and sat himself down on the end of Eiður's bed. "I don't think you did," he said, and paused, looking around. "I'm technically only twelve, I suppose. Do you know anything about the cloning process?"

"A bit. You'd have been matured in vitro to what, about seventeen?" 

"About seventeen," Treize confirmed. 

"You're still younger than me even if we pretend you're twenty-nine now, you realise." 

Treize didn't have a response so he glanced around the room again, at the tapestries, at the worn old floor, wondering how old the place was, wondering if it had been there for centuries or maybe just since Eiður's birth. After all, grown stone all seemed to look very much the same. There was a large family portrait up on one wall, again sewn into a tapestry that hung between two of the small slit windows, full of blonde-haired teens and twenty-somethings with their parents, then two sets of grandparents. 

"I like your family," Treize said. "The ones I met. They seem like good people." He glanced at Eiður who was still swinging his legs then back up at the tapestry. "It must be strange to have so many siblings."

"They're mostly pains in my arse," Eiður said, oddly fondly, and looking simultaneously amused at the notion. "I'd think you'd know what it's like, you've got even more than me. I mean, you're one one of thirteen and I'm only one of nine." 

Treize made a face. "I don't think you can really call them siblings," he said. "All we do is argue." 

Eiður raised his brows and crossed his arms over his chest in something like protest. "And yet somehow you don't think they're siblings," he said. "I fight with mine all the time."

It was an entirely foreign notion and one that stymied Treize completely: he'd never thought of the other Loïcs as _brothers_ , after all, because they were all just instances of the same clone genre. They'd never been envisioned as siblings, more like living machines with the same skill sets from one instance to the next, designed for a specific purpose. Even Céleste, the first clone genre, with all her power as head of the vast Vortex Corporation that armed the Treizième military and created all the clones, had originally been intended for one particular purpose. The twelve Célestes had been intended as aides to the twelve Treizième senators who formed the Treizième government, a function which they actually did still perform although they'd taken on further duties, further responsibilities. Of course, where the other genres had begun to diverge in terms of skills and memories and accents and roles, the Célestes were still almost like twelve limbs of one entity. Compared with them, Treize supposed the Loïcs really were more like brothers.

"Your sister said I should ask you to take me to Himinbjörg," Treize said in the end, to break the unusual silence that had settled in between them.

Eiður chuckled lowly, wryly. "She would," he said, playing with his beard braids as he looked at him. "How about I take you to the baths first? I smell like two days of space travel and wolfhounds."

"I didn't like to say so, but..." Treize said, lightly. He thought it might have been pushing the bounds of their relationship somewhat to tease him that way and had almost begun to regret it as soon as the words had left his mouth, but Eiður laughed. 

"I think I've been teaching you bad habits," he said, not like he objected to it at all, and hopped down from the dresser with a twinkle in his eye. "Come on. It'll be fun."

They left their things there in Eiður's room, their bags of clothes and Eiður's sword, and wound their way back down the staircase, strode down corridor after corridor and went down another staircase, then _another_ , getting lower and lower. It seemed warmer the lower down they went, till the stone of the walls wasn't grown but rougher, natural stone, slick with condensation, and Treize's brow was slick with sweat. They came out into a wide room that seemed to have been carved right out of the rock with tall pillars that prevented its collapse and baths that sank into the floor, like Þórr had scooped great handfuls out of it and water had bubbled up there in its place. There were springs down there, it seemed, hot ones, and here and there Treize saw people in the water or wandering between the pools, stripped down to their bare skin or wrapped up in towels.

"All this heats the town above us," Eiôur told him, as he led him over to an alcove at the far side of the room, pulling off his shirt over his head as he walked. There was a small pool in the alcove, secluded and shadowy, and Eiður pulled off the rest of his clothes in short order, tossed them onto a bench in the corner and settled into the pool with a sigh, sitting himself on a seating ledge beneath the surface so the water came up chest-deep. He spread his arms along the side of the pool then apparently changed his mind and started to unbraid his hair as he looked up at Treize, the inside of one wrist brushing against the torc at his neck. 

"Where did you get that?" Treize asked, as if that would make the moment any less awkward at all for him. He patted his neck and gestured at the torc lying around Eiður's neck and Eiður ran his fingertips along the metal for a moment, tapped one of the knotted ends and shrugged. 

"My grandfather gave it to me just before he died," he replied. "He was chieftain before my father and his grandfather had it before him and his grandfather before him since the first lumenium mine opened here. Everyone tells me I should sell it but fuck that, what would I do with that much money? I'd rather remember my grandfather than have to start thinking about investments." He jutted his chin toward Treize's ring. "There's lumenium in that too, right?"

Treize nodded, rubbing at the ring with his opposite hand. "It's for emergencies," he said. "Enough to bring one clone body to life. In case I ever need to be reinstanced and there's a short supply, I suppose." 

They went silent for a moment and the awkwardness that had never quite passed settled back in in earnest, though Eiður looked his usual amused self. "Are you coming in?" he asked in the end. "I didn't bring you down here so you could watch, Treize. I don't think bathing's a spectator sport, strictly speaking."

Treize nodded stiffly, though he actually thought perhaps leaving would have been a far better idea. He took off his clothes and Eiður watched him do it, his eyes moving over him with a lazy smile on his face, then he stepped down into the water. 

"Good, isn't it," Eiður said. 

"It is," Treize agreed, as he settled down and let the water drift up to his collarbones. It _was_ good, almost too hot at first but the warmth settled in and made his tired muscles yield, though Eiður was still looking at him and the expression that replaced his smile was much less conducive to relaxation than the water was. 

"I knew another Treizième clone before you," Eiður said. 

"You did?"

Eiður nodded, then dunked his hair - now out of its customary brain - into the water. He ducked down under the surface briefly, wetting it all, then raked it back away from his face. It made him look strangely gaunt. "Yeah. I was seventeen and he was one of the new Pierres they sent out here to help Jérôme 12 with the trade negotiations. Pierre 599612."

"It was his first life?"

Eiður nodded again, combing his fingers through the ends of his hair beneath the surface of the water. "Yeah. He didn't have any previous memories to go on so I don't think he really know what he was doing. He'd only been out of the glass for about six months by then. I mean, I know they fast-mature you all to seventeen or eighteen or whatever it is and pipe in fuck knows how many facts and figures but he was _really_ new. Confused, you know? He was a lot like I was then."

"You were friends?"

"You could say that." Eiður smiled faintly, part way between wistful and wry. "He taught me to speak Treizième. The Admiralty tried to say that was why they assigned me to you 'cause I was the only officer they knew of who could speak your language, like that matters. The truth is I was a test pilot and I crashed my last ship into a fucking asteroid and that was nearly the end of me. It wasn't the first time I'd done something fucking stupid, either, so my dad pulled some political strings and I ended up on Fólkvangr, with you."

"And Pierre 599612?" Treize said. 

"I don't know. After the treaty delegation found out we were fucking, they sent him back to Nivôse. I haven't seen him since three days before my eighteenth birthday." 

Treize's stomach tightened. In a moment, and although he tried not to, he could imagine it: the tall new Pierre with his fair skin and his sandy brown hair and his blue-grey eyes like all the other Pierres, a younger Eiður, the bed in the tower where Treize had just been sitting. Maybe he'd sneaked him in at night, maybe 599612 had pushed Eiður down onto his back, sprawled between his legs, kissed him, put his mouth on him, put his cock inside him. Maybe they'd met in corridors, hiding in shadows, trying to keep quiet so no one would hear. Maybe they'd met outdoors and pushed against each other till they made a mess of all their clothes. Maybe they'd met there in the baths, right _there_ in that same pool. He could feel himself getting shamefully hard just thinking about it, from the images running through his head as Eiður watched him. He was thankful that it was dark there, that the water was deep and rippling slightly, so Eiður couldn't see beneath it even if Treize could. 

"I know, you know," Eiður said, watching him levelly across the pool. 

Treize frowned. "I'm sorry, I don't know what you mean, you know."

"I know," Eiður repeated, and the last vestiges of his smile faded away. "I know you've been watching me."

Treize's stomach sank sharply. "I don't know what you mean."

"You're a terrible liar, Treize." 

"I'm not lying."

"Yes, you are." Eiður stretched his arms out wide, resting them along the edge of the pool, the tattoos at his wrists standing out against his heat-pink skin. "You weren't as quiet as you thought you were. Remember, I know you can see in the dark."

"But why didn't you stop me, if you knew?" Treize asked, wondering faintly if he could slip under the surface and pretend he'd ceased to exist. 

Eiður chuckled lowly. "I wanted you to watch," he said. "I wanted to see what you'd do." He raised his brows at him. "I wanted to see if you'd say something. I wondered if you'd want to join in." 

"You wanted me to?"

Eidur folded one arm back in and tugged on his beard braids. "Yes," he said, and it didn't seem like he was joking. 

"You know we're not meant to, don't you?" Treize said. "Vortex have us all born sterile and anyway, in the Treizième it's forbidden for clones to have any kind of relationship with citizens."

"So you mean the Loïcs can't..." Eiður made a comically obscene gesture with both his hands. "You know."

Treize smiled wryly. "I said sterile, not impotent." 

"So you're saying clones aren't meant to have sex at all?"

"If we have those kinds of urges, we're meant to explore them with clones of other genres." 

"So you're saying it's fine if it's not with a real person?" Eiður asked, making ridiculous air quotes around the word _real_ that made Treize feel strangely nauseated. He knew there was a kind of movement in the Treizième that said clones were just as real as any citizen was, that they should have choices, interests, changes of career away from their specifications if they wanted to, and that relationships between clones and citizens should be decriminalised immediately, but Treize honestly hadn't given it much thought. He hadn't been anywhere close to the Treizième in his entire lifetime out of the glass, so perhaps he'd just thought it better to ignore the whole thing and continue on as normal. 

"That's one way to put it," he replied.

"So, you're saying 599612 should've known better."

"You should both have known better." 

"And you've never met another clone?"

"You know I've not. Not since the day I arrived on Fólkvangr." 

"And you follow the rules?"

"Well, yes."

"So you've never...?" He made the same obscene gesture again and Treize laughed, slightly manically, not quite in control, his head reeling. 

"No, I've never." 

Eiður moved. Treize didn't try to stop him. 

Maybe it wasn't quite unexpected, though at the time it seemed very much like it was. Maybe he should've seen it coming, because evidently Cinq and Neuf both had, from whole star systems away. But Eiður moved and Treize just sat there dumbly; Eiður pressed him to the side of the pool with his big hands on his bare skin and Eiður's mouth went to the side of his neck, Eiður's fingers raked over his short hair, Eiður's hand went down under the water and found his cock already hard down there. He flashed a smile at that and he pulled back, just far enough that Treize's glasses could make out the shape and size and weight and even the water displacement of Eiður's own erection under the water and then he went down, ducked down, Eiður's head going under the water and then, _then_ , Eiður's mouth closed on him while he was still submerged. It was like electric in him. It was like nothing he'd ever imagined it would be, simultaneously infinitely better and tragically, shamefully worse. 

Eiður's hair floated around him and Treize tangled his fingers into it, not sure what else to do. Eiður sucked at Treize's cock, his mouth almost as hot as the water was. His hands pushed Treize's thighs wide and he took him in as deep as he could, bobbed his head, his tongue teasing at the tip and then sliding right down the length of him and before Eiður could even run out of breath, before he'd been down there even a minute, Treize's hips bucked and his cock kicked and he came in Eiður's mouth, startled, disconcerted, and vaguely horrified at himself. He wished it hadn't happened. He wished he'd requested that new custodian after all. No matter what Cinq and Neuf said, he should have known better. 

"I'm not like Pierre 599612," Treize said, still breathless, when Eiður came back up for air. "I'm not even like the other Loïcs."

Eiður laughed, wiping at his mouth with the back of one hand and clearing water from his eyes with the other. "I know," he said, as he looked him straight in the eye, glasses and all. Then he rested his forehead down against Treize's for a moment, closed his eyes and slipped one hand to the back of Treize's neck. He was so close that Treize could feel his breath on him, could feel his cock brushing hard against his abdomen, his thighs against his. 

"I know who you are, Treize," he said. "I've been with you twenty-seven hours a day for nearly three months and y'know, I'm not completely ignorant. And I don't want a fucking replacement for some old ex-lover I've not seen in nearly fifteen years. I'm not looking for a replacement and I've not got some kind of weird fetish. I'm not just looking for another clone."

"You're not?"

Eiður pulled back. He cupped Treize's jaw in his hands. He looked at him head-on, his blue eyes serious.

"When did I give you the impression I give a fuck that you're a clone?" he said, earnest or at least seeming it. "I want _you_."

More than anything, Treize wanted to believe him. More than anything, Treize wished he hadn't said anything at all.

\---

In the early morning, Eiður took him to Himinbjörg. 

Once they were out of the pool and back into their clothes, it was almost as if nothing had ever happened, at least for a start. Of course, Eiður had always stuck close by him, there'd always been a hand at Treize's shoulder or at his hip or the small of his back, and he'd always thought that had just been Eiður's way, or maybe the Valhallan way, or at least the way of Valhallans from Þruðvangr. Still, as they made their way back up to the top of the tower that Eiður explained was his home and had been since his parents had given the residence on the top three floors of it to him, as they wound their way up the staircase with Eiður right there by Treize's shoulder, he had to wonder if he hadn't just missed it, this thing that had apparently happened while he'd been busy denying it. He wanted it, and simultaneously hated that he wanted it. 

They went up and they sat in the living space that reminded Treize oddly of their room on Fólkvangr with its heavy wooden furniture and ageing leather upholstery, though obviously the tapestries would have seemed quite out of place in any proximity to the lab. Eiður brushed out his long, damp hair with his fingers like a comb while he talked then he tied it back into a braid again and Treize watched him sitting there, one leg thrown over the arm of his chair the way he always seemed to do. Any other configuration of his limbs in an arm chair just seemed wrong. Treize felt an odd, unanticipated kind of fondness for it. 

"What are you smiling at?" Eiður asked him, looking somewhat amused by the idea that Treize was smiling at all. 

"You, I think," Treize replied. 

"You're not sure?"

"I'm not sure how sure I am about anything," Treize said. "Well, except that the other Loïcs are going to say _I told you so_."

Eiður raised his brows. "Been talking about me?" he asked.

"They have."

"Not you?"

"I wasn't really sure what to say."

Eiður grinned, stroking his beard braids as if in contemplation. "You could've started with _he's devilishly handsome_ ," he suggested.

Treize gave a faint huff of amusement. "And modest, of course."

"The most modest." But then, slowly, Eiður unhooked his leg from over the chair arm and leaned forward on his knees, his amusement oddly dampened. "They've seen me, haven't they. That thing you put in your head at night, 599612 had one. He tried not to use it so no one would find out."

Treize wasn't entirely sure what he was supposed to say to that. He wracked his brain and all of the other Loïcs' memories for any order, any edict, any guideline or anything even remotely close to such that said he couldn't explain Treizième technology to outsiders and he found nothing at all, which was likely an oversight on Céleste's part since so few Treizième actually had any contact with any other nation, let alone contact that involved an actual conversation. So, in the end he said yes and he explained the transceiver, he explained the link they had between them, explained that the Loïc genre had been created to create, to innovate, to solve mysteries, to make society better. None of the other Loïcs gave a damn about Treize having sex with a Valhallan. Some of them found it quite difficult to give a damn about Treize at all, their strange thirteenth brother that had never been meant to be. Some of them he liked and was liked by in return. Some of them had strong opinions on the growing clone-positive reformist movement and would have supported him whoever he'd been involved with. 

"You know, technically speaking we've not had sex," Eiður said, twirling his beard braids thoughtfully. "At least not all the way." The way he looked at him next was practically a sin, like he was undressing him in his head, like there were all kinds of things he was suggesting they do right then and there. But then he stood and he held out a hand and said, "We should go down to dinner."

Treize took his hand and said, "You did that on purpose," but he was smiling as Eiður pulled him up off the couch. "You're teasing me."

"Treize, I've been teasing you since the day we met," he replied. "I really don't think that's going to change now."

They had dinner with Eiður's rather extensive family, attended the feast that apparently came each year on the evening before Þórr's Day, everyone laughing and joking amongst themselves, noisy and joyful. It was like the hall where they'd eaten on Fólkvangr except larger and louder, where no one had set places at the table except for Oláf Sigmarsson, who was both the planet's chieftain and Eiður's father, and of course his wife, Sigrún. Halla was nearby with her husband and six children who ranged from a laughing toddler up to a big red-headed youth of about eighteen years of age who'd be chieftain one day, after his mother. Everyone talked but no one mentioned the work Treize did, like they'd been directed away from it. No one mentioned the virus at all, though Treize knew it had to be present in the back of their minds at all times. There were flare-ups every few years, but that didn't mean to say no one was affected in the meantime. And even those who received the treatment weren't cured; all he'd managed to do was drive the most deadly effects of the virus into temporary, mostly-dormant states; in some cases he hoped they might last a lifetime, but in others the virus recurred with frightening regularity.

And afterwards, when they'd eaten so much that Treize wasn't sure he could stand, there was music and dancing and he sat aside while Eiður took to the floor with a sister-in-law of his who looked roughly seven months pregnant and then with his mother whose long grey hair swung around her like a curtain as she laughed. Then there was an older aunt, then a very young niece three feet shorter than he was who he twirled by the waist, much to her delight. Treize sat aside and watched and barely even noticed for a start when Oláf Sigurdsson sat down at his side, leaning on a twisted, knotted cane. 

"My daughter Halla told me what you've done," the chieftain said after a long, silent moment, his voice a low rumble in his vast chest that seemed even lower still than Eiður's. Treize turned to him, looked up into his steel-grey eyes, into a face that might be Eiður's in another thirty years or so, and then the chieftain took him by the wrist so naturally Treize's hand closed around his in return. "I don't speak much with my son Eiður now but he tells Halla you were never thanked." He paused, his grip tightening solidly, seriously. "I'd like to thank you, for my world."

He wanted to say _I'm happy to help_ , or perhaps _I wish I could do more_ , but it sounded strangely hollow as it swept through his head. So what he said was, "Finding a cure for Thor's Virus is the sole reason I'm alive." 

Oláf nodded, like he understood. For a moment he clasped Treize's wrist even tighter still, till it very nearly hurt, and then stood and walked away. Treize watched as he rejoined his wife and his first daughter, her husband and their children. 

"I think he likes you," Eiður said, his appearance at Treize's side remarkably stealthy for a man so large. "He's still pissed at me for crashing that ship but you, I think he likes."

"I think your people know how to enjoy a feast," Treize replied, avoiding the issue, and Eiður tutted as he surveyed the scene. The abrupt change in subject did, of course, have the virtue of being true, because there wasn't a soul in the hall who didn't look entertained to some degree. 

"They'll be at it till the sun comes up," Eiður said. "It won't be long, another three hours or so." He gave him an odd, conspiratorial sideways glance. "We should leave if we're going to Himinbjörg."

Treize was intrigued despite himself and so they left, rising from their bench and heading for the door that led to the vestibule that led to the tall front exit. Halla waved as they went by and Eiður rolled his eyes at her as he guided Treize through the hall, between the benches lined with people, one hand at his back. Once they were out, they put on their coats and hoods and gloves and boot spikes, then went out to the kennels to find a team of dogs. Few mechanisms seemed to work correctly in the Valhallan cold, Eiður told him, and so they'd domesticated certain breeds of the huge native hounds and horses. In the Treizième, they'd stopped doing so centuries earlier, didn't even keep pets the way Eiður said people had on Earth. It was difficult to see which way worked best.

It was close to a three-hour drive on the sled through the snow with the dogs running hard, three hours with the icy wind whipping against them as they sped along wrapped tight side by side in furs. They climbed higher, up toward the mountains, up into the hills, along paths that Treize could barely make out even with the enhanced sight enabled by his glasses so he had no idea how Eiður saw them in the relative dark, except he must have been there before and must have known the way, or else the dogs did. They went higher, wound their way along the edge of a cliff and Treize held on tight to the wood of the sled as they whipped around turn after turn, the cliff face to one side and a long, sheer drop at the other, his heart in his throat. It was a strange new feeling. 

Then there they were, at one bank of a wide frozen river, looking up at a huge frozen waterfall that stretched up high into the sky above, and Eiður pulled the dogs to a halt. There was a grown stone hall there, low and small, not much more than a shelter from the weather, but they didn't go inside. They just let the dogs go in without them instead and they went up the icy stairs onto the roof, sat themselves down at the edge with their legs dangling over the side, Eiður's heels bouncing off the stone as he swung his legs. The roof was so low Treize thought Eiður could probably just have jumped for it and pulled himself up instead of using the stairs at all. 

"This is Himinbjörg," Eiður told him, leaning close so he could hear through the fur of his hood without he'd already settled quite close. "It's my family's land. It's the first place stone was grown on Þruðvangr." Then he raised one hand as the sun began to rise, as the thunder boomed out in the sky so loud it verged on painful and somewhere behind them, down the hill, lightning crackled and fizzed and charged the air, made Treize's vision tingle oddly and then struck the frozen fields outside Bilskírnir. Eiður raised one hand to point and Treize watched as the frozen waterfall refracted the red-gold sunlight of the dawn and turned into a rainbow, like a bridge climbing up into the sky. 

"We call the waterfall Bifröst," Eiður said. "We burned my sister's body here when the virus took her, so she could find her way to the gods." 

Treize hung his head, but Eiður tilted up his chin and turned his face toward him. "I was twelve," he said. "She was thirteen and she bled to death. I don't think she felt anything because the medics knocked her out but there was nothing we could do." His hands went to Treize's biceps and he squeezed there, more like he was anchoring himself than he was doing it for Treize. "I know what you're thinking. If we'd had you earlier, she might still be alive. And I _know_ what you're thinking. You think I'm here with you because she died."

"You're not?" Treize said, and he regretted having said it though it was precisely the thought that had entered his mind. 

In the dawn light of Þórr's Day, Eiður pulled off his fur hood and set it aside on the rooftop, then he did the same with Treize's. He pulled off his gloves and he set them aside, too, then he took Treize's face in his warm, bare hands, his palms at his jaw, his thumbs at his cheekbones. He looked him in the eye as best he could, considering the glasses. Then he kissed him before either one of them could say another word, pressed his mouth to Treize's in the morning sun, the braids in his beard tickling against the hair over Treize's chin. 

"I'm not here for the cure," Eiður said when he pulled back. "Who the fuck even knows if that's ever going to work? I'm here because you're the kind of person who won't stop just because the work's hard or because no one expected you to get anywhere with it in the first place, or because someone tried to take your credit away. It's because you're the kind of person who didn't need credit in the first place." He kissed him again, slowly but ardently, his fingertips tracing the transceiver housing in the back of Treize's neck. "None of this is because of any ghosts from my past, Treize. You understand that, right?"

In one near-overwhelming moment, Treize found he actually did understand. Eiður didn't care about the Treizième's rules. Eiður didn't care that Treize was a clone and there were other instances just like him, in basic appearance if not necessarily in every other way. Eiður didn't care that he was working for a cure to the virus that had killed his sister. What he cared about was Loïc Treize and conversations that ran on into the night, about work they shared and afternoons eating fruit, about islands in the midst of frozen lakes and new experiences, experience after experience that had brought Treize to life almost as surely and finally as the lumenium had. What Eiður cared about was _him_ , and he'd never expected it. 

And when Eiður hopped down from the roof, bypassing the stairs completely, Treize followed him, his descent cushioned by the thick snow below. He followed him inside, through the thick wooden door into the hallway where the dogs were sleeping in a furry huddle. He followed him into the living room beyond that where Eiður lit a fire in the fireplace, where he pulled out furs from a weathertight storage chest in the corner and spread them over the floor by the flames. Then Eiður turned and looked at him, sober and intent, stripped naked bit by bit right down to his skin in the firelight, and Treize watched him do it, rapt. He watched him set aside his clothes on the grown stone floor in the oldest home on Þruðvangr, watched him go down on his knees and then sit back on his heels, his thighs spread out wide. He watched him wrap one hand around his cock and stroke till he was hard. 

"You're making me nervous," Eiður said, looking up at him, and the exact curve of his faint smile said he meant it. "Are you going to join me at all or am I just putting on another show?"

"I didn't think you had nervous in you," Treize replied, actually surprised to find that was the truth, but he pulled off his coat, he pulled off his boots, he undressed himself while Eiður watched him do it and he told himself every step of the way that he shouldn't, that he shouldn't even be thinking it, that the rules all shouted he should do exactly the contrary. He told himself he should stop, that it had all been a mistake and if he had this kind of physical inclination then perhaps he could speak to Jérôme 12 and see if he felt likewise, because that, of course, lay perfectly within the rules by which he lived. He told himself he should stop but then he went down on his knees there with him. Treize kissed him, twisted his fingers into Eiður's long hair and pulled him into it and then Eiður's hands were on him, at his hips, at his thighs, one hand wrapping around the half-hard length of him and just the feel of it had him fully erect in moments. Then Eiður went down on his back on the furs and he pulled him down with him, pulled him down over him, caught Treize's cock and his own between their bellies and laughed unsteadily as they shifted together. Treize's insides felt like so many knots at the feel of it, at the very idea of what they were doing, at Eiður's erection pressing against his, at Eiður's laughter reverberating in his chest. It was almost too much. It was contrary to every he'd believed through his whole life.

"You know what to do, right?" Eiður said, his mouth by Treize's ear, his hands skimming down the length of Treize's back. Then he reached away, tugged at his coat, turned out one pocket so his ID and his keys and his rank insignia tumbled out onto the floor with a stoppered bottle of something viscose shining there behind strengthened glass. He pressed it into Treize's hand. Treize understood. His stomach clenched.

He shivered. He remembered everything he'd seen the others do, Neuf with Jérôme Premier, Trois with various Oliviers and Thierrys and sometimes both together, a torrid affair that Sept had once conducted with Achille 1022841. It was all there, ready in his mind.

"I know what to do," he said, and he went up on his knees between Eiður's thighs. 

By the time he'd slicked himself, he was already halfway gone to breathless. By the time he ran his fingers down between Eiður's thighs and found the tight ring of muscle between his cheeks, he was so hard and so jittery that he didn't know if he was even going to make it up inside him. He knew how this all looked, knew how it was supposed to look, knew the things he was supposed to do because he'd seen them in the other Loïcs' memories, but how it felt was new, brand new, exhilarating, sickening, dizzying he wanted it so much. He nudged forward as Eiður pulled up his knees. He guided the head of his cock down against him. And Eiður watched him as he did it, as he pushed forward, as he felt himself push in and then push deeper, felt Eiður pull tight and then sigh out a breath as he fought to relax around him, to let him in. He let him in. 

It didn't last long, though Treize supposed he hadn't expected it to, assuming he'd had any kind of expectation. He pushed in right up to the hilt and Eiður's arms spread wide on the furs beneath him, took two handfuls as he shifted, as he got one leg up high over Treize's shoulder and the other wrapped around his waist. He could see the exact dilation of Eiður's pupils, the exact hue of his flushed skin, how taut his muscles pulled as he pushed against him, as he took himself in hand and stroked. 

It didn't last long, the two of them moving there together, Eiður goading him into moving harder, faster, till he was up on his knees between Eiður's thighs, fucking him in long, deep strokes, Eiður's hand on his own erection making his body pull tight around Treize's cock in him. Treize held tight at Eiður's thighs and clenched his teeth and bucked and came inside him, pushed up deep, breathless, their skin slick with sweat in the warmth of the firelight. And Eiður looked at him, pulled him down into a fierce kiss though the angles were all wrong, all awkward and uncomfortable, but that hardly seemed to matter to either of them at all.

"We'll go back to Fólkvangr tomorrow," Eiður said, as Treize finally pulled back out of him, as he flopped exhaustedly down onto his back on the furs and Eiður turned, half-covered him with his own broad body, hot skin on skin. 

"Tomorrow," Treize agreed. 

But what that meant was they had another day and night together there together on Þruðvangr. Treize intended to make the most of it. He had decisions to make.

\---

The lab and their rooms and the living space in the building back on Fólkvangr seemed oddly like home when they returned there. 

Eiður slept in Treize's bed the night they got back, snoring lightly though the sound didn't bother Treize at all, and that first night, when Treize housed his transceiver and stepped into the link, Cinq and Neuf had been joined by an amused, oddly celebratory Trois. Treize hadn't seen him in months, owing to their oddly opposite sleep patterns. After all, suns and sunrises and even the lengths of days differed widely between the twelve worlds of the Treizième, no two completely alike.

"You've got excellent taste, Treize," Trois told him, almost conspiratorially, from his couch there across the white room. "I approve. And here I thought Fólkvangr made tedious viewing."

Treize grimaced, half embarrassed and half somehow not, perhaps because he knew there was nothing he could keep from the other Loïcs and besides which, none of the others seemed to try to. And, of course, Trois had literally only stepped into the link outside his usual schedule to tell tales of his sexual exploits and to quiz Treize about his own. Trois had been involved in the clone reformist movement almost since its inception, but Treize sometimes wondered if Trois wasn't in it more for the idea of sex with citizens than for any of the liberties the movement's leaders claimed they wanted. It seemed cynical even thinking it, but Treize suspected it wasn't far from the mark.

Of course, the place where things had really taken off between Treize and Eiður wasn't Fólkvangr but Þruðvangr. Trois had likely seen everything they'd done, from the baths to the little stone hall at Himinbjörg, to Eiður's room at the top of the tower. He'd likely seen it when Eiður's hand strayed over Treize's thigh at lunch in the hall and Halla gave the two of them a rather knowing look. He'd likely seen it when they went out to skate on the nearby lake in the sunlight with half of the town, like it was part of the Þórr's Day festivities to have one last skate before the ice began to melt, and when Treize slipped and fell he'd grabbed Eiður's coat and accidentally pulled him with him. He'd likely seen the heap they'd ended up in, all arms and legs and skates and Eiður's hair tickling his face then they they'd pulled themselves up and Eiður pressed his mouth to Treize's forehead, pressed his mouth to Treize's mouth. Trois couldn't have seen the thrill Treize felt, of course, couldn't have felt the confusion when he realised no one cared what the two of them were doing, that no one seemed surprised. 

Trois and the others likely saw that night when they went to bed in Eiður's tower, when they stripped out of their clothes and turned out the lights. 

"They all thought we were having sex anyway," Eiður explained as they lay there in the dark that posed absolutely no difficulty to Treize's vision whatsoever. "Y'know, even before we were."

"Dare I ask why?"

Eiður ran one hand down the centre of Treize's chest and made him shiver lightly. "Because I brought you here," he said, like that was obvious. "We don't just bring friends and I didn't _have_ to bring you. I mean, I could've left you on Fólkvangr like you thought I was going to." 

"So you're saying they all expect us to be having sex so we shouldn't disappoint them?"

"I'm saying I didn't correct the assumption because I hoped you'd want to." Eiður pressed his mouth in under Treize's chin. "And look, I know you and your ridiculous sense of duty and propriety and what the fuck ever. If you don't want this then for fuck's sake don't just do it 'cause you feel a sense of obligation." He pulled back, lying there on his side in the dark with his head propped up on one hand; Treize knew Eiður couldn't see him, but Treize could see Eiður. "Look, I get that you're probably confused. Don't fuck me because of it."

And Treize knew he'd almost persuaded himself that was exactly what it was, that it was just about what Eiður had wanted and that he was somehow bound by that just as he was bound by his function to create a cure for Thor's Virus, but that was patently ridiculous as he watched Eiður then. He didn't feel obliged. He didn't feel powerless to say no. He didn't feel like he should do as he was told because he was a clone or because he was a captive because in truth, he'd never felt much like he was Eiður's captive at all, more like Eiður was in some way his guide and in some ways his apprentice, more like his collaborator. He'd never felt like they were on unequal footing and the attraction was real. He was attracted to Eiður's confidence and to his self-possession. He was attracted to Eiður's talents and his openness and to the intelligence he in no way lacked. He was attracted to Eiður's mischievous smile and to his long blonde hair, to the breadth of his shoulders and the warmth of his hands, to his collarbones and his cock and the dimples at the small of his back. Of course, that didn't mean it was simple. 

"I don't feel obligated," Treize told him. "I'm just not sure how to reconcile what I want with everything I know about who I was meant to be."

"Does it matter who you were meant to be?" Eiður asked, the question entirely genuine. "Y'know, who you are now's not bad." 

Treize smiled, though Eiður wouldn't see it, and reached over to give Eiður's beard braids a teasing tug. "I don't know," he said. "But I know I don't want to stop." 

Trois had likely seen what happened next, how Eiður hooked one long leg over the back of Treize's as they lay there face to face on their sides in Eiður's bed, how Eiður kissed him, how Treize returned that kiss. They probably all saw it, albeit in snatches, when Treize's hand wrapped around Eiður's cock and Eiður's hand found his in return, how they stroked each other, how their breath caught, how Eiður's eyes closed and his face flushed and his hips shifted. He hadn't tried to restrain himself at all that night on Þruðvangr, didn't try to restrain himself after, and Treize couldn't say he didn't admire that. Eiður felt things, fully and immediately, from which Treize had always shied away. And when they'd come and they'd cleaned themselves in a somewhat cursory manner, they'd gone to sleep and waited for another day to come. In the morning, they'd said their goodbyes and left. Thirty-six hours later, give or take, they'd arrived back on Fólkvangr. 

"So, how are the others?" Eiður said when he woke that morning on Fólkvangr, the fingers of one hand walking their way sleepily across Treize's bare abdomen underneath the bedspread. Pyjamas had apparently become highly optional since their return. Treize couldn't exactly find it in him to complain about that fact. 

"Trois told me to tell you he wants to see you on top," Treize replied, feeling oddly like the embarrassed grimace he'd made when Trois had suggested it had followed him straight out of the link. Eiður found that completely hilarious, not that Treize felt inclined to agree. 

"Tell him he's a perverted voyeur," Eiður said, and kissed him quickly. "And I've got a better idea anyway." He pushed back the bedspread and pulled himself up out of bed, stark naked with his long hair in desperate need of a comb, with that familiar sly smile on his face. "I'll tell you all about it another day."

Treize wasn't sure if he liked the sound of that or not, except when he thought about it he knew he did. He'd thought about Eiður for weeks by then, after all, about his hands, about his mouth, about the warmth of his skin, and the reality of it hadn't let him down at all. All it had done was made him want him more, though the concept was still faintly confusing. Not that the other Loïcs have any issues whatsoever with Treize having sex with a Valhallan. The majority seemed to actively encourage it. Treize himself seemed to be the one of them suffering a kind of existential angst.

They showered together though it was quite a fiasco, all elbows and knees and Eiður's hair getting wrapped around Treize's fingers until they were both exasperated but laughing with it as they disentangled themselves, then they made for Eiður's shower instead where there was more room for them to move because apparently the notion of taking separate showers just hadn't occurred to either of them. Then they dressed and they ate breakfast in the living space and then went down into the lab to work. After all, the cure was unlikely to invent itself.

The work was just like it had been since the beginning there with Eiður, or at least since he'd started to assist instead of swinging a spatula like a deadly weapon and in his hands, Treize wasn't entirely convinced it wasn't. They worked well together, Eiður's seemingly unrelated stories somehow allowing Treize's intellect to zero in on issues in his calculations, to extrapolate and to recalculate and then make the next new step based on their results. They ate lunch in the break area as they always did, though Eiður had managed to order in two Valhallan apples that he knew Treize liked and Treize wondered idly who he'd had to bribe to make that happen. And then, at the end of the day, they went upstairs to shower off the faint odour of lab work and change and rest. 

The work continued as usual though their nights were somewhat different than they had been, sharing a bed as they did. There was no sneaking to Eiður's door because he was there, taking up just as much space as Treize imagined a man of his frame would. There was no peeking at him in the dark because they kept the lights on till it was time to sleep, so Treize wouldn't the only one who could see. Then they slept and Treize stepped into the link. He asked the others what they knew about Pierre 599612 and they said they knew nothing at all so he asked if they could find out; word came back the following night that 599612 hadn't been reinstanced after his first death, some time after he'd returned from Þruðvangr to Nivôse, though there were no specifics in the file. Cinq didn't remember him. No one knew anything about him at all. Neuf, the eternal cynic, said he'd known more than one clone to just disappear without a trace like that; Cinq backed him up, though Treize wasn't sure what to believe.

Work continued as usual, and their outings continued as usual. They skated on the frozen lake, ate the occasional meal in one of the noisy halls, spent a long and rather fruitless afternoon ice fishing from the dock on Eiður's uncle's island. They went up to the roof of their building at night once or twice, too, stood on the edge and looked out over the city and over the lake and peered out at the string of small towns that together formed the city of the lake's far side. Eiður wrapped his arms around Treize's waist as they stood there, Treize's back pressed up to Eiður's chest, and they looked out over the lights of Brísingamen twinkling like Freyja's necklace on the far shore. Treize always thought it was strange that Eiður's height and bulk had never made him feel small, had never made him feel less of a man or less in any way at all, even though he stood a good eight inches taller. Eiður had never treated him as less than. Then they returned to work, as they always did.

It started just like usual, Eiður in the chair that Hallmar had always occupied, telling Treize stories about Earth and how once upon a time it had been a home to all of them, the exodus and then early life on Þruðvangr, how his ancestors had discovered lumenium there and used it to grow their homes. The Valhallans have always used so much less lumenium for their building works than the Treizième have used for their cloning, and Treize has wondered now and then if that's how the attack on Niflheim had happened, if that was how trade had flourished once upon a time on Þruðvangr between the Valhallans living there and the Treizième, before the Valhallan Commonwealth was formed. After all, by then the Treizième had mined Nivôse and Pluviôse almost dry, as well as most of the moons of Mandar.

It started like usual but then Eiður stood and came over to the couch where Treize was sitting and he paused there for a moment before he reached down and took the glasses straight from Treize's face without so much as a second's hesitation. He walked away across the room with them and set them on a dresser and Treize's stomach lurched sickly with it. It was even worse than the time he'd piped a feed from his glasses into a viewscreen to show Eiður how he saw the world - "That's nonsense," Eiður had said, stroking his beard braids. "I'm much handsomer than that." It was even stranger than that, the recursive nature of it as he looked into the viewscreen and showing him seeing the viewscreen showing him seeing the viewscreen, on and on into infinity. He can remember even now how disconcerting the feeling was. 

"Can you see yourself?" Eiður asked. 

"Yes," Treize replied, keeping very still. He'd done it before, of course, and he'd told Eiður that it was a possibility. He'd seen the others do it on occasion, too, leaving the glasses in one place with the interface still active, still connected, while they walked into another place and it was always just as strange, he'd never managed to get used to it. He knew the transmission limit of the neural interface was roughly ten metres because he'd tested it and so had the others. He knew that taking them off and moving them around without switching off the interface was oddly vertiginous, like the room was moving all around him, like he'd just disconnected his sight from his body and waved it all around because in a way he had. 

"Is this okay?" Eiður asked. 

Treize nodded faintly, finding it odd that his sight didn't move along with his head. "Yes," he replied. 

Then Eiður went down on his knees on the floor in front of him and Treize watched him do it with a disconcerting feeling of both detachment and immediacy, voyeurism and the tingling sense of touch. Eiður unbuckled Treize's belt and he touched him, put his mouth on him, licked him, sucked him, made him grip the couch and shift his hips and tangle his fingers into Eiður's long hair and Treize watched it happen, off-balance but so aroused that his head spun and it wasn't just a product of his disembodied sight. And then, when they went to bed and Treize put in his transceiver, all the other Loïcs would watch it, too. Cinq would be able to get his vicarious thrills after all, and Trois would probably be oddly impressed. 

There were nine of them there that night when he stepped into the link, and it wasn't Treize's escapades with Eiður Oláfsson that had brought them there. Cinq and Neuf had been joined by Douze, Trois and Premier, and they welcomed Treize down to his couch with mostly uncharacteristically solemn faces. Just a few minutes later, in walked Deux, Sept and Huit. They'd apparently been waiting for them.

"Quatre and Six understand the situation," Trois said. "Dix and Onze?"

"I've spoken with Dix," Huit said. "He's relaying the message to Onze."

"To business, then," said Premier, and he turned to Treize and said, straightforwardly, as was his manner, "At some point in the next few days, you're likely going to be arrested."

Treize frowned. "Why would I be arrested?" he asked.

"Because three weeks ago, we synthesised Thor's Virus," Douze said, and the idea of it struck Treize hard. 

"And an hour ago, we infected all of Þruðvangr with it," Cinq added, with an expression of complete devastation on his usually jocular face that Treize could barely stand to look at. "They took off from Nivôse. It was done before I could stop it." 

"Céleste wouldn't have let you stop it, Trois," Premier pointed out.

"But I could have _tried_."

"We weren't made for this."

"Even Céleste wasn't made for this."

And all Treize could think as the conversation continued was about was Halla, about Eiður's family, about a hundred or more people under the roof of Oláf Sigmarsson's big hall, and a funeral pyre by the thawing waterfall for all the dead once the virus did its work. It was horrifying. There were nine hundred thousand people there on Þruðvangr. 

"What do we do?" Treize asked. 

"I saw the formula," Trois said. "I think they synthesised the virus here on Thermidor. You'll have it when you wake up, Treize, so go back to work for as long as you can before they get to you. Maybe the Valhallans don't know what's happened yet."

"The rest of us need to locate our Célestes," Premier said. "We need to find out who gave the order. If this is a prelude to invasion, we need to stop it before it goes too far. We are _not_ going to war with the Valhallan Commonwealth."

But Treize knew it had already gone too far. He just hoped they could all act in time to stop the seemingly inevitable: even had the treatment he'd made been 100% effective, there was nowhere near enough of it in existence to keep everyone on Þruðvangr alive. They already couldn't produce enough to keep the current sufferers adequately supplied for the majority of the time. In less than a week, perhaps eight days at the most, two thirds of Þruðvangr's population would be dead and the rest would likely follow soon after. The only consolation Treize had was that to stop it, to save those lives, all thirteen instances of the Loïc genre were willing to commit high treason. They were willing to risk their lives to save Þruðvangr.

He woke with a jolt when the plan was complete. He had work to do.

\---

Eiður was understandably beside himself when Treize told him what had happened on Þruðvangr, albeit in vague and sketchy details because vague and sketchy details were all that they had, but he couldn't not tell him. He wanted to go there but Treize convinced him to stay, convinced him that he'd just be infected too and he'd be more use to all of the people there on Fólkvangr - to his family, because Treize knew that was what he was thinking - working on the cure there with him instead. And so they worked. Anxiously, feverishly, but with all the continued care they could muster, they worked.

"Did they know?" Eiður asked as they set out the equipment. "The other Loïcs, I mean. Did they know it was going to happen?"

"Not until there was nothing they could do to stop it," Treize replied. "I know they're a lot of things, and not all of those things are good, but they're not cowards."

Eiður nodded tensely. It might have been easier if the Loïcs _had_ known and they both knew it; it wasn't a pleasant thought that people so much like himself could have been complicit, and thankfully they hadn't been or he'd have known it or at least suspected, but if they had then Treize would have had the solution already.

It seemed Trois had seen an early version the formula on a screen while he'd been in the lab just down the corridor from his own that afternoon, looking for someone with a shirt he could borrow since he'd just introduced his own to an accidental spray of revolting, lumpy grey gunk. The Thierrys in the lab were acting strangely when he entered, furtive in a way they'd never been with their work before, though obviously Trois hadn't spent a great deal of time in their lab for him to understand what that difference meant. He hadn't realised what he'd seen until later, after the news had hit. And while the formula brought Treize closer, there was something missing from it. They had no way to know if the formula Trois had seen was weeks old or decades old, if they'd been working on this in secret for four months or forty years, and there was _definitely_ something missing.

Cinq, on the other hand, had found out what was happening from the Sylvies and the Oliviers who had been loading canisters containing the virus into ships in the hangar not too far from his lab. He often spent lunchtimes with Nivôse's pair of Magalies, 11 and 19, since his assignment for the past several years had been assisting them in refining the cloning process in order to maximise lumenium efficiency, and the Nivôse cloning labs had a substantially less than scenic view overlooking the main hangar bay. By the time they'd found out what was happening down there, however, the ships had already launched. By the time Cinq, along with the two Magalies and a handful of horrified Benoîts had forced their way into the traffic control room to try to stop them, the ships were already gone, punched into hyperspace with no way to recall them, not even a way to fire on them. They'd taken control of the laboratory complex after that, a huge centre that was nominally owned by the Vortex Corporation, and they'd locked it down, but there'd been nothing they could do to stop the attack. Céleste had cut their comms so they couldn't even raise Þruðvangr to warn them. They hadn't been able to get a signal through until it was already too late.

"They're all doing what they can," Treize told Eiður. "Just like we are."

Eiður didn't seem particularly consoled and Treize couldn't say he blamed him at all. After all, they hadn't managed to get a message through to his family; they needed permission for unscheduled offworld communications and for the moment they just didn't have it. 

No one came for Treize that day, though they expected it at almost every moment, and they worked into the night, till they were starting to make more mistakes than their work could afford. They went to bed and Treize slipped into the link and Premier was waiting there with an update: news of what had happened had spread through the clones quickly. A squadron of Treizième ships had been dispatched to Þruðvangr to taint the main water supplies to the six main cities, and just hours later the overwhelming majority of the planet had been exposed. Clearly the Oliviers and the Sylvies and the Thierrys had known already once their counterparts involved in the attack had entered their link and when the Magalies and Benoîts on Nivôse housed their transceivers, they spread word to their genres, too. Premier had addressed the Anaïs and Inès genres there on Brumaire and it spread out from there in waves through the rest. 

Premier told all the genres that if any further attack on the Valhallan Commonwealth were to be forthcoming, he meant to stop it before it began. Cinq and the Nivôse cloning staff were holding the lab complex that comprised the majority of clones stationed on that planet, effectively blockading Nivôse from being used as a military staging ground. Soon everyone everywhere in the Treizième République, clones and citizens alike, knew that the Loïcs opposed all military action against the Commonwealth. Céleste denounced them as traitors. Premier went on air and asked the entire Treizième what nine hundred thousand lives meant to them.

"You're trying to start a civil war," Treize said. 

Premier smiled tightly. "I don't think we have a choice," he said. 

In the morning, they returned to work. Eiður hadn't been able to raise his family through the usual communication channels and word was spreading of an outbreak of the virus on Þruðvangr, so Treize surmised it was only a matter of time until someone there realised what had happened. They didn't have much time, and time was running out on Þruðvangr. 

"There's something missing," Treize said, just past midday, their lunches sitting almost completely untouched on the table. "I'm close. There's just something missing and I can't see what it is."

"It'll come," Eiður said, and he smiled tightly, the same strained smile he'd seen on Loïc Premier in the link, burdened and distracted. The way Eiður's hair was pinned back, the gloves and the apron he wore, where once they'd seemed amusing, now they seemed oddly desperate. They needed a cure more desperately than they ever had before. "It'll definitely come. It just needs to come soon." 

Then the smile faded from Eiður's face. He tossed his sandwich back onto its plate, what little appetite he had apparently then entirely vanished. 

"Did they send you here to fail?" he asked, like that horrifying notion had just popped unbidden into his head, and Treize put his glass down rather heavily against the table, horrified that Eiður had even asked. But he understood, he supposed. He knew what some Valhallans thought of the Treizième. He knew how Hallmar had felt about him in particular. It just hurt to hear it from Eiður, even if he suspected his own hurt was the reason he'd said it.

"Why would they do that?" he asked. 

"Lumenium." 

"Do you think I care about lumenium?"

"I--" Eiður dropped his head into his hands, all pretence of strength in the face of their new adversity stripping painfully away from him in the process as Treize watched. All Treize could do was stand up and step around the table and rest his hands on Eiður's shoulders in the vague, vain hope that that might serve to console him somewhat, his thumbs brushing at the skin above the torc he wore. The _lumenium_ torc he wore. Beneath his glasses, Treize's eyes went wide. His pulse quickened.

"I think I know how to make it work," he said. 

That night, he extracted the lumenium from the ring he wore, carefully, attentively. In a flash, he'd understood what was missing, and it had been right there all along.

"I thought you said that was just for emergencies," Eiður said as he watched. 

"Wouldn't you say this counts?" Treize replied, and Eiður nodded, the look on his face skirting close to a grimace. It was the single greatest emergency either of them had ever known, and they both knew it. it had to work.

They didn't really have the equipment for effective lumenium work there in the lab, but Treize knew the protocols, understood the chemistry of the substance, and he introduced it to the latest batch, to the one he'd thought should've worked and yet none of the simulations they'd run had worked at all. Lumenium interacts so strangely with so many other substances, grows stone, powers starships, gives life to clones. And when Treize did it, when he activated the lumenium, when he introduced it to the sample batch, he was _sure_ he'd found what was missing. It had been easy to miss: in nature, there are no natural compounds of lumenium. The reaction has to be forced.

"I think I know how this happened," Treize said, when the completed samples were finally running through the simulation, though he honestly hoped he'd find his idea was a million miles from the mark. "I need to speak to the others." And there was nothing else that they could do but wait, so Eiður watched the samples while Treize went upstairs. He clicked his transceiver into its housing. He went into the link.

In the link that night, all the couches were occupied. All of the Loïcs were present. Treize had never seen them all there at once before, so many familiar faces, the different instances with their different physical ages, their different mannerisms, their various accents. He didn't need to check the screens above their heads to pick one from the next, but comparisons weren't the reason he was there. 

"Did we create Thor's Virus?" Treize asked them. 

They were all silent, until Neuf cleared his throat. Every pair of glasses in the room turned swiftly to him. 

"I spoke to Jérôme," Neuf said, and the wording said it all. He'd spoken to his lover, to Jérôme Premier, and through him, through the Jérômes' version of the link, he'd spoken to all twelve instances of the Jérôme genre. Neuf took a breath as they all watched him, ran one hand over his close-cropped hair then he steeled himself and he nodded.

"The Jérômes knew all along," Neuf said. "It was an order. Then there was a threat. Jérôme Neuf had an accident and he was never reinstanced and the others were told if they breathed a word the same would happen to them. They've known for forty-three years."

"What are you saying?" 

Neuf drew a slow, deep breath, looking every inch like the wished the thought in his head would evaporate straight out of existence. Then he nodded again, as if reassuring himself that he had to continue, that there was just no other option at all.

"We did this," Neuf said. "Forty-three years ago, we created it in a lab on Thermidor and then we set it loose on Þruðvangr. And everyone who knew was sworn to silence." 

And what Neuf said confirmed what Treize had already thought he'd known but had devoutly wished he hadn't. The Treizième hadn't just synthesised Thor's Virus, hadn't just made more of what was already present in nature there on Þruðvangr, as horrific as that thought had been. They hadn't just synthesised it; they'd created it. 

Thor's Virus was man-made. They'd made a virus to kill a planet.

\---

In the morning, Treize woke to the sound of Eiður arguing outside the bedroom in the living space. By the time he'd removed his transceiver and put on his glasses, the arguing had stopped. By the time he'd turned back the bedspread, pulled on his pyjamas and gone out into the room, Eiður was sitting in Hallmar's chair with his head in his hands. 

"The simulations came back positive," Eiður said, glancing up at him as he entered. "I couldn't sleep so I went to check and they're _positive_."

"That's good, though, isn't it?"

Eiður smiled wryly. "The fucking Admiralty won't let us test it," he said. "They won't even let us leave the building now, let alone go to Þruðvangr. My entire family's going to die because I work for fucking idiots who'd rather let a planet die than trust a Treizième. What the fuck have they even got to lose at this point?"

Treize had no idea what to say so he chewed at a piece of cold toast with no enthusiasm in him at all. He'd done it. _They'd_ done it. They'd found a cure and they ought to have been celebrating, the ought to have been overjoyed, ought to have been all smiles and wine and triumph. But they weren't going to be able to do a single thing with the cure they'd made and it made Treize sick to his stomach to realise how naïve he'd been to believe just creating a cure would be enough. It had taken six months to get the treatment into testing, after all, and they did _not_ have six months to test the cure. He'd wasted the last twelve years. It wasn't enough. He hadn't done it anything close to soon enough.

"I'm sorry," Treize said, though it sounded quite pathetic even to him, not nearly enough to make up for everything that the Treizième had done, not even close when there'd been more than forty years of deaths from Thor's Virus there on Þruðvangr, when one of its victims had been Eiður's sister, when his family was more than likely infected along with the rest of their planet. No doubt the Treizième military was already on its way there, the battleships and their battalions of Sylvies and Oliviers taking off from Frimaire and from Nivôse to take Þruðvangr while they were so close to defenceless, and all because of the lumenium. All because of the fucking lumenium they used for cloning. What were nine hundred thousand lives when compared with millions of clones, after all?

"You've done everything you could," Eiður replied, and suddenly he was crossing the room, coming closer, coming quickly, reaching for him. "None of this is your fault." And he pushed Treize up against the stone wall there behind him, made him drop his half-eaten slice of toast on the floor in the process. "You've done what the Valhallans couldn't do in forty years," he said, his voice strained and his mouth pressed up at the side of Treize's neck, his fingers twisting into the fabric of Treize's shirt just above his waist. "You made a fucking _cure_ Treize. No one even thought it was possible." He pressed his parted lips up under Treize's jaw and sucked there, hard, hard enough to bruise him, as his hands went everywhere, to Treize's hips, to his arse, down between his thighs. He pulled back, just far enough to look at him, his face flushed, his grip tight at his hips. "You're incredible," Eiður said. "You're fucking incredible." 

It seemed ridiculous and Treize half-smiled but Eiður was apparently deadly serious about it. He was serious when he took Treize by the wrists and led him into the bedroom they'd been sharing, the one in which Treize had lived for the past twelve years although they both knew the custodian's room was larger. He was serious when he undressed him, his mouth pressing hot to every new inch of skin that he uncovered, serious when he pushed him down onto the bed and then followed close after, settled over him, pressed down against him. It was almost overwhelming, the anxiety and the anger, the desperation and the despair that Treize could see so close under the surface of Eiður's desire.

The look on Eiður's face was dark and hot and urgent as he slicked his fingers with oil from that same stoppered bottle, as he knelt there between Treize's legs, Treize's thighs draped over the top of his own. Treize let him do it, wanted him to do it, felt Eiður's fingertips rubbing there against the hole between his cheeks, felt them pushing in, felt himself pull tight around them completely against his will. Then Eiður slicked his cock and Treize watched him do it, watched him coat the whole length of it, watched him shift closer. He was big, bigger than Treize was, but Treize knew he could take him, had seen Trois with Achille 4549, seen Sept with Achille 1022841, had seen them when they'd left their glasses on the bed or on a dresser or the time Trois put his glasses onto 4549 so he could see everything from his lover's point of view as he opened him up and pushed inside him. Eiður did the same, pushed into him, stretched him and filled him and made his breath hitch and his cock fill up hard in response. 

It seemed ridiculous because they'd failed even though they'd succeeded and maybe that was why they did it then, in the despair at the end of the struggle. Eiður moved, fucked him slowly with his hands gripping tight at Treize's thighs and Treize braced his hands against the headboard above his own head, pushed against him, took him in right up to the hilt. Then Eiður stopped, pulled out, pushed and pulled Treize till he turned away and went up on his knees and then he was in him again, pulling Treize back against his chest as he moved inside him. One big hand went around Treize's cock and he just held there for a moment with his forehead pressed down to Treize's shoulder. Then he stroked him, made him gasp as he leaned back hard against Eiður's broad chest, as he reached back to grasp at his thighs so he could push back harder against him. 

They came like that, Eiður's pale hands on Treize's dark skin, breathless and desperate and so taut it was nearly painful. And Treize took off his glasses, killed the interface, set them aside while Eiður was still pushed up deep inside him. He pushed him away, pushed him down, put his hands on him and his mouth on him, felt the contours of muscle under warm skin, felt the brush of hair, Eiður's callused fingers at his shoulders, Eiður's strong legs wrapping up around his waist what would have almost been playfully under any other circumstances. No one would ever feel exactly what Treize felt then. No one would see it, so he didn't have to share it with anyone. Eiður seemed to understand. 

Then they showered together, washed each other's skin, Treize's glasses still in the bedroom so his hands moved over Eiður under the spray, over his big arms, over the muscles in his back. He leaned up against him, Eiður's long hair tickling against his chest, pressed his mouth to the back of one shoulder. Eiður turned and he kissed him, wrapped his arms around him, held him there. Treize had no idea how he was holding himself together, knowing what he knew about his family, given what he didn't and couldn't know. Twenty minutes later, Treize found out he _wasn't_ holding himself together. He shouldn't have been surprised. Deep down, he supposed he'd been waiting for him to break.

Once they'd dried and dressed, they went down to the lab and by the time they got there, Eiður's manner had changed. 

"I think I know what we have to do," he said, and he strode over to their stock of virus samples, keyed in the release code and opened up the door. He'd already done what he meant to do by the time Treize realised what he was doing; Eiður loaded a sample into a needle gun and then he injected himself, straight into the crook of his arm, while Treize looked on in utter, abject horror. Then he pulled himself up onto the worktop just like he had that very first day and he sat there, swinging his legs. Treize just looked at him, absolutely aghast. 

"You could have warned me before you did that," Treize said, still very nearly agape.

"You'd have stopped me."

"Of course I would!"

"Then you know why I didn't warn you." 

Treize sighed, running his hands over his hair, digging his nails into the back of his own neck because frankly he had no idea what else to do. "And what if the cure doesn't work?"

"It'll work."

"You can't possibly know that." 

"Then I guess you'll have to give it to me and we'll see who's right." 

But Treize didn't see. 

There were footsteps upstairs. There were footsteps on the stairs. The guards pushed into the room and they took him away before he could administer the cure and Eiður started to move, started toward them, meant to make them stop, but Treize just held up a hand and shook his head. Even if Eiður had stopped them, they had nowhere to go. And if Eiður had stopped them, at the very least they'd have stripped him of rank, stripped him of his tattoos in bloody bands. 

They left Eiður there and all Treize could do was hope they let him self-administer the cure. The Treizième didn't need even one more death on their conscience; Treize wasn't sure he could live with Eiður's on his.

\---

Before they left the lab, long before they locked him up, they took away his glasses. He couldn't see after that but no one there seemed to be particularly perturbed by the way he fell to his knees in corridors, tripped on stairs, hit doorways with his shoulders while his hands were cuffed behind his back the way they were. They wouldn't speak to him so he stopped trying to force them to. He had no idea what would happen to Eiður. 

He was shoved into a cell once they'd removed the cuffs from his wrists and he tripped and hit the floor, bruising his knees, grazing his hands. Then there was someone there who helped him first to his feet and then down onto a less than comfortable stone seat. He supposed he was glad they'd stopped moving him at the very least. 

"Who are you?" Treize asked. 

"Jérôme Douze," replied Jérôme Douze. "They brought me here from Valhöll. I'd show you my tattoo, but..." Treize nodded. He took the point, since he couldn't see at all and the typical Treizième greeting would be somewhat lost on him. "I assume you're Loïc Treize." 

"I am," Treize replied, and he did manage to pull up his left sleeve to show the tattoo at his wrist. He felt like his palm might be bleeding, and like he might have just stained his sleeve in the process of easing it up. That seemed to matter remarkably little, however, given the situation.

"I think they plan to execute us, Treize." 

He didn't doubt it. It didn't sound much like Douze doubted it, either. The issue was there was very little they could do about it; the cell was locked up tight, the Valhallans were holding them for who even knew what perceived heinous crimes, one of them had likely barely even set foot on Fólkvangr before that day and the other one of them was entirely blind. And to top it all off nicely, neither one of them even had their transceiver. They were severed from their respective links. 

Execution didn't come, at least not in the first three days. They sat there in the cell, Treize and Jérôme Douze, sat on the stone bench shoulder to shoulder or stretched out on the stone floor, barely talking because what was there to discuss? Treize had gathered within the first half hour there that the Jérômes absolutely had been complicit just as Neuf had said - it wasn't that they'd assisted in creating the virus because the Jérômes didn't have that skill, not that they'd assisted in distributing it, but they'd known, forty years before, when Céleste Première had given them the order to introduce the virus on Þruðvangr. 

Treize had never met a Céleste but if half the things he'd seen from the other Loïcs were true, he couldn't say he had any desire to meet one. Of course, he couldn't say he was particularly impressed with the Jérômes, either, even if the Treizième government were the ones who'd decided to commit genocide. Of course, he'd never met a Treizième citizen. He couldn't even name a single member of the government without wracking the others' memories. He'd never seen a Treizième world. For the first twelve years of his life, he'd never even set foot on a planet that wasn't Fólkvangr; he'd never set foot on a world that wasn't Valhallan. 

And when they slept, neither one could link with the rest of their genre. Treize had never been apart from them for so long before and the loss made him anxious. He'd never had to dream before, either, because the link took the place of dreaming, and in his dreams everyone on Þruðvangr bled. That was what the virus did. That was what he'd been trying so hard to prevent.

"Let me see him." 

Treize woke to the sound of Eiður's voice, loud and angry and not too far away at all. He heard footsteps in a corridor outside the cell, echoing, the sound of Eiður's boots against stone floors. He was alive. He didn't even sound like he was suffering, Treize thought, so maybe the cure had worked after all. That was all he'd been able to hope for.

"Why do you want to see him?" asked another voice, an unfamiliar one, gruff and brusque. "He's one of them. You're not telling me you think you can trust him?"

"He's as much one of them as I am," Eiður said, and Treize heard keys jangling against a lock nearby. He sat up. He waited, Eiður's words rattling around in his head, jarring. 

He understood what Eiður meant, of course: that Eiður Oláfsson was demonstrably Valhallan, that no one could accuse him of being anything else, no one could accuse him of subversion or rebellion, and that his credentials were impeccable, and so were Treize's. But Treize also knew he _was_ one of them, he _was_ Treizième. There was no escaping the fact that even though there were genetic differences between him and the rest of the Loïcs, even though he'd been created specifically for life on Fólkvangr, even though he'd never so much as seen a Treizième world, Loïc Treize was _not_ Valhallan. He felt like he should say it, felt like maybe Eiður needed to hear it because he was risking something - risking a lot - just in being there. But in the end he said nothing of the sort, so maybe he'd been wrong when he'd said the Loïc genre wasn't cowardly.

"Treize."

His voice was close and Treize stood and went forward, fumbled his way down the wall to the odd stone bars that formed the front of the cell. His fingers closed around two of them and Eiður's warm hands closed on top of his. 

"Did it work?" Treize asked. 

"It worked," Eiður replied, his voice low, not quite conspiratorial but almost there. "Look, they're not going to let me stay for long, but it worked. I'm sorry, I couldn't bring your glasses." He huffed out a breath. "And I'm sorry I was a fucking idiot."

"You do have that quality sometimes, yes," Treize said, and Eiður snorted, half-amused. 

"Remind me why I like you?" he said, and there was a second then when Treize honestly had no idea why he did, none at all, given who he was and who his people were, what those people had done. And Eiður seemed to know it, maybe because of the look on his face, maybe because there was no pithy retort, maybe the lumenium in his system had done the unthinkable and had made the big lug psychic, who knew. But he squeezed Treize's hands and pressed his mouth to the knuckles of one of them. He tugged him closer and kissed his mouth between the bars. 

"Thank you," Treize said. 

"For what?"

"For coming."

Eiður chuckled lowly. "I didn't come just to kiss you, Treize," he said, murmured under his breath. "I thought you could use this." And at the back of Treize's neck, Eiður's fingers fumbled his transceiver into its housing. Treize felt it click into place. "Tell the others how to make the cure."

"They don't have the lumenium to make it work."

Eiður took one of Treize's hands and brought his fingers up to the torc around his neck. To the _lumenium_ torc around his neck. 

"I have," he said. "Have the Loïcs contact me. We can do this, Treize." He paused, lacing his fingers with Treize's. "Do you trust me?"

Treize squeezed his hand. "You know I do."

"Then tell them they can trust me, too." He kissed him again, just quickly, then he stepped away. "I'll see you when it's done." 

Then he left. And Treize lay down, and he closed his eyes. He stepped into the link.

\---

"She's gone too far," Cinq said, and from everything he'd heard in the past ten minutes, from everything he'd heard about Céleste in the past twelve years, Treize couldn't help but agree. 

"Are we absolutely sure?" Trois asked. "Look, I know it's Céleste but...are we _absolutely_ sure?"

"Are you saying you doubt it?" Neuf said, even angrier than usual, and Treize understood why. He knew he would have been the same in Neuf's place. The same or worse, at least. 

"Even after everything we've seen in the last few days?" Cinq said. "C'mon, Trois, you really can't doubt it."

Trois sighed. He shook his head. "I don't doubt it," he said. "Frankly I just wish I did." 

They'd all seen it in the link, what Céleste Première had done just hours earlier, there on Brumaire. Loïc Premier had been there and so had Jérôme Premier, the latter recently arrived from Frimaire where he'd left Neuf heading a small but definite resistance movement. And when Jérôme had said _no_ , for all of the Jérôme genre, Céleste had shot him in the head, for all of the Céleste genre. Loïc Premier had turned and run and Céleste's bullets only caught him once, in the arm, though he'd bled and bled. He'd made it out alive, to tell them all that Thor's Virus hadn't been the Treizième government's idea at all. 

Thor's Virus was and always had been Céleste's, her little plan to weaken Þruðvangr and take it for the Treizième, one way or another, sooner or later. Treize supposed at least now they knew why Vortex had been so very reluctant to create the thirteenth instance of the thirteenth genre, the problem-solvers; they knew why they'd been so reluctant to create _him_ , whose sole purpose was to help the Valhallans find a cure for that same virus. Céleste had never meant for the virus to be cured. They'd engineered it to be close to impossible. 

And then, while Premier had been passed out and bleeding in Magalie 14's cloning lab, all twelve Célestes had walked into all twelve of the Treizième senators' offices on all twelve worlds of the Treizième République, and they'd put a bullet in each senator's head. She then broadcast simultaneously to all of those twelve worlds and told the people that Valhallan assassins had killed their senators, murdered their whole government. She called Loïc Treize a traitor who'd assisted them in doing so. She called the Loïc genre traitors who'd rather talk away the issue than confront it, who'd rather concede to the Valhallans than confront them. She declared the Quatorzième République, with the twelve Célestes as its senators, in order to keep their people safe. And then, she declared war on the Valhallan Commonwealth.

"When you said I meant to start a civil war, Treize, you were right," Premier said, inside the link. "I've been asked to lead the reformist movement and I've agreed. I don't intend to fight the Valhallans. We're going to cure the virus and then we're going to kill Céleste. All twelve of her." 

They all agreed to the plan. They all agreed, from Cinq who still held Vortex's largest cloning installation on Nivôse, to Neuf whose lover Céleste had killed; from Loïc Premier who was bleeding on Brumaire, to Treize in his cell there on Fólkvangr, they all agreed. They'd wipe out the whole Céleste genre, because she meant to do the same to all thirteen of them, because she meant to do the same to nine hundred thousand Valhallans on Þruðvangr. They had a plan. All that remained was the execution of it. 

When he woke, Eiður was there. Once he'd passed Treize his glasses, once Treize activated the interface, he saw there were three guards lying there unconscious on the floor and Jérôme Douze was standing by the open cell door, gaunt and pale, keeping lookout. 

"They'll kill you for this," Treize said, looking up at Eiður as he removed his transceiver and slipped it into his pocket. Eiður offered him his hand and he took it; Eiður pulled him up to his feet. 

"Well, they were going to kill you," he pointed out. "The Admiralty scheduled your execution for tomorrow. I've ended up quite liking your head, you know. I don't have a great ambition to see it detached from your shoulders."

Jérôme Douze cleared his throat by the cell door. "I hate to say it but you two need to leave before anyone realises what's happening," he said. 

"And you?" Treize asked. 

Jérôme Douze smiled wryly as Eiður turned and headed out through the door, into the corridor outside. "Someone needs to tell the truth about what's happening," Douze said. "Céleste sent me here as an ambassador. I think it's time I did my job, don't you?"

Treize didn't need to say it: they both saw quite clearly that the Valhallans would probably kill him. They'd probably go through with the execution exactly as planned and not listen to a single word he said. But maybe, just maybe, he'd be able to sow a seed of doubt in some of their minds, just _some_ minds, about who was really responsible, about who should be held accountable, and whether war with what had been declared the Quatorzième République was actually the course of action they should follow. Maybe, just maybe, some of the Valhallans would see. Maybe, just maybe, some of those Valhallans would be the right ones, the ones with the power to stop it. 

"Bon courage," Treize said, and reached out one hand. 

Douze clasped it. He had no more words and Treize understood; Treize turned and he left, with Eiður by his side, his footfalls echoing in the corridor as they left Jérôme Douze behind, still there in the unlocked cell. Douze had a job to do, and so did they.

The streets outside were snowy, flakes caught up swirling in the air and lying thick on the ground, and Treize was grateful for the leather coat and thick Valhallan boots he was wearing, not to mention grateful for the cover of the fur-lined hood they'd brought back for him from Þruðvangr that effectively covered his face, that Eiður had brought into the jail for him to pull on in disguise. They made their way through the streets to a hall where they waited, loitering outside its doors, until a familiar figure exited. The man nodded in their direction and then led them away. Treize knew in one very strange instant exactly who it was, from the bulk of his frame and his limping gait. 

"Hallmar?" Treize asked Eiður. 

Eiður shrugged. "He owed me a favour," he replied. "And he might be the only other person in the Commonwealth who doesn't think you're a Treizième spy. Well, the only person who's not currently bleeding to death on Þruðvangr, at least."

"I thought he hated me."

"Oh, he does," Eiður said, crunching through the snow. "But that _doesn't_ mean he thinks you're trying to kill us all."

Treize had to admit that somehow, where Hallmar was concerned, that notion made perfect sense. So they followed Hallmar into a car hovering there inches above the snow at the corner, settled into the back seat and watched the old man drive. He somehow didn't seem as old has he had just a few months or so earlier, while he'd been sitting in that chair in the living space or sitting in the lab with those sharp eyes and that pervasive indifference to the work Treize did, so perhaps retirement had been good to him already. Or perhaps the manner he'd shown Treize had been a study in commitment to his assignment and the Valhallan military, but Treize suspected the former rather than the latter.

They wound their way through the snowy streets and went out to the civilian transport hub just outside the city proper, left the car in a temporary parking structure and made their way into a private hangar. Hallmar had a ship there, Eiður said, probably one that his grandchildren's company had designed and put together out on Valhöll, and when they stepped inside the hangar, he handed it over to them with a curt, silent nod. 

"Thank you," Treize said, earnestly. 

Hallmar's lined face twisted into something that approximated a wry smile, though it seemed somewhat out of place from what Treize had always known of him. Hallmar nodded. "Don't prove me wrong, Treizième," he said, and then he turned and he left them there, striding back out of the hangar the way they'd come. Treize wondered if he had a plan, if there was another way for him to leave the planet and return to Valhöll, or if he'd risked everything to help them. He didn't feel much like finding out, however, and so he didn't ask the question. Far too many people had risked too much for this already.

With Hallmar's codes, they were able to take off, with Eiður at the stick. Treize remembered what he'd said: Eiður had been a test pilot. He'd told him tales of tests gone wrong and tests gone right, missions flying out to Indus and Ravin where cryosleep to weather the four- or five-month journey was the norm, missions where he'd flown great carrier ships, missions where he'd flown single-seat fighters against the small bands of Roman raiders on the edge of Valhallan space. The small ship they were in, sub-light drives and hyperdrives and cryochambers and all, was nothing compared to piloting the great mass of Huginn, as Eiður had for two years of his career. He made the complex control console look like childsplay as he primed the sub-light drives.

"What's the plan?" Treize asked, settling into the co-pilot's seat as they received their clearance and began their launch. 

"We're heading to Nivôse," Eiður replied. They pulled up out of the hangar and he tilted the ship, switched gear and shot up into the planet's lower atmosphere. "Loïcs Trois and Neuf are sending as much of the base of the cure to the complex as they can. Loïc Cinq says he has the facilities to mix in the lumenium on a large scale."

"And then?"

Eiður set coordinates for Nivôse and pushed the little ship into hyperspace, the view from the viewports turning fuzzy in Treize's glasses. 

"Then we take the cure to Þruðvangr," Eiður said. "We save the planet."

"You make it sound so simple." 

"I think it's fairly simple," Eiður said, and he turned in his seat to face him, leaned forward with his hands on Treize's knees to kiss him. Then he drew back with a faint little smile. "It just won't be _easy_."

\---

"You're shorter than I expected," Cinq said, grinning up at Eiður as he clasped his forearm to greet him the Valhallan way. Then he pulled up his left sleeve and showed the number 5 tattooed there on his wrist: the traditional Treizième greeting. Of course, Treize would have known Cinq in a room full of Loïcs, even without the tattoo.

"Treize told me I'd like you," Eiður replied, with a grin of his own to match. "Don't prove him wrong, he hates that." 

Treize just shook his head at the two of them, though he couldn't say the tenor of the meeting was exactly unexpected. He knew them both tolerably well, he thought, and so he'd expected it.

The air was warm there in the Nivôse cloning complex, warmer that it had been on Fólkvangr and much warmer than Þruðvangr, and it was significantly less oxygenated than either. Treize had warned Eiður about that, of course, though it wasn't a low enough percentage to do much more than fatigue them unless they decided to go for a jog around the complex, and they rolled up their sleeves to pretend they weren't sweating into their tunics. They were. The optimum conditions for Treizième were not the optimum for Valhallans, and Treize felt he was caught awkwardly between the two. 

Cinq's lab was nothing like Treize's back on Fólkvangr, though that was hardly a surprise when Treize had seen all of the other Loïcs' labs through their memories and none of them were anything like any structures the Valhallans built. The lab was huge, full of white workbenches and a virtual army of white-coated, white-jumpsuited Thierrys and Anaïses, the scientist and medic genres whose eyes went wide when Eiður tugged the torc from around his neck and handed it over to them, leaving a faint line of blue around his neck where it had rubbed off against the skin. They all went back to work immediately, buzzing around the lab, cleaning the lumenium and inserting it into a machine that would portion it out, settling the pieces into the equipment that would infuse the other components and complete the cure. Treize was interested in a way but Cinq was on hand and he knew those memories would appear in his brain the next time they both entered the link. He didn't need to stay and watch.

"Use my rooms," Cinq told them, breaking away from proceedings for a moment. He seemed more serious in person, at least at this particular time, in this particular occupation, and it made sense with what they all knew was at stake. "You know the way. Faites comme chez vous." He made a vague gesture in the air and he turned back to the Anaïs with the clipboard who was hovering in front of him. "We'll be ready in six hours. Get some sleep." He turned back to the two of them with one eyebrow quirked and a faint but very Cinq smile at his lips, a glimmer of what Treize always saw in the link. "Or _don't_ sleep. But try to have the decency to wait for me if you don't."

Treize chuckled and Eiður gave a mock-solemn nod of mock-agreement. It was oddly heartening that the two of them seemed to get along, and Treize realised he'd been anxious about their meeting. Apparently, he hadn't needed to be at all.

"He's nothing like you," Eiður said, as they made their way away down the corridor outside the lab, down to the stairs at its end that Treize knew would lead up to Cinq's living quarters. Eiður sounded surprised, at least vaguely so. Treize wasn't sure what he'd expected, but it wasn't that.

"Did you ever meet any other Pierres after 599612?" Treize asked. 

Eiður gave him a look that said he already knew where this was going and it was nowhere that he'd meant at all, that this was nothing like what he'd intended, but he played along despite that and told him, "Yeah, one or two."

"Were they the same as him?"

"They looked the same." He stopped abruptly and Treize stopped too, and he turned back to face him. "I didn't expect you to be like Cinq, you know. You're the one with the fucking angst about you being a clone, not me." 

He stepped closer, walked Treize back up against a convenient wall and trapped him there with one hand pressed to the wall at either side of his shoulders. And maybe there was something more he meant to say, an anecdote he meant to tell or maybe just some kind of witticism, but in the end he didn't. Eiður just kissed him, hard, leaning in against him, pressing him there with his body against him, with his fingers tucked into the pockets of the Valhallan leather trousers Treize was still wearing despite the heat there inside the complex. The way he did it was almost desperate, exhausted and oxygen-starved and overheated, and all Treize could think to do was push him away, make him step back. Eiður's whole expression was bruised when he did it, but Treize took a handful of the damp shirt over Eiður's chest and tugged. 

"Come with me," he said, and he turned, and led him away. He led him up the stairs and down the corridor. 

Cinq had only been half kidding about the two of them not resting and Treize couldn't dredge up any memory of his own, or of Cinq's, to suggest he'd care at all what they did when they got to his quarters. The palm scanner scanned him in through the door as Loïc Cinq because there'd been no need to install an instance-specific scanner when none of the Loïcs ever left their designated worlds, almost like the Treizième citizens who never left their homeworlds, or rarely at any rate. They went inside, went through the living room that Treize had seen so many times there in Cinq's memories, went straight into the bedroom and Eiður raised his brows as Treize stripped off his own damp shirt, pulled off his boots, stripped himself naked in front of him. 

"Onze and Douze have grey hair," Treize said, watching Eiður watch him, watching Eiður not-quite-idly unlacing the neck of his own tunic, and he ran both of his hands over his dark, close-cropped hair. "Premier broke his nose when he was younger. Twice." He trailed two fingers over the bridge of his own nose, then down over his arm. "Huit dislocated his current instance's left shoulder a few years ago. He has limited mobility in his arm." He wheeled that arm to show his own perfect mobility then swept one hand over his stomach and Eiður's gaze followed it. "Deux had his appendix removed. Why we were created with appendices is another story, but he has a scar just here." He reached out and tucked one hand under Eiður's tunic, pressing his fingertips down where he knew Deux's scar was, where he'd seen a hundred times where Deux's scar was, and Eiður pulled his tunic off over his head, tossed it onto the floor at their feet. 

"Neuf has a scar," Treize went on. He brought one hand up to Eiður's face then moved it down over the side his neck, over his collarbone, turned him around to face the door and then trailed his hand down between his shoulderblades, over his back, down to his hip. "There was an accident in his lab and he was burned. Six clones died. Six _people_ died. Two were so badly burned that they couldn't be re-instanced. He still blames himself." He pressed his mouth between Eiður's shoulderblades, wrapped his arms around his waist from behind. He fumbled with Eiður's belt then pushed his trousers down over his hips. "You know, he had a lover. Céleste killed him. He won't be coming back, either." 

He rested his forehead down between Eiður's shoulderblades. He stood in close against him, his cock caught up against Eiður's back. "I used to think the Loïcs were like parts of a whole. Like we were one person split into thirteen pieces. That's how we're taught to look at ourselves."

"And you don't think that now?" Eiður asked.

"I realised I remember everything they've done but I don't feel any part it," he said. "Just like they can't feel this." He ran his hands over Eiður's chest, down over his hips as he sighed against his damp skin. He let Eiður turn and lean back against the door then he went down on his knees, ran his hands over Eiður's thighs, pressed his mouth to one hip then licked a long stripe up the side of his cock and made Eiður chuckle in surprise. 

"We're all different. All the clones are different, even when we look the same. I _know_ I'm not the same as them."

"I sincerely hope you're not," Eiður said, running one hand over Treize's short hair. "I mean, I don't know what I'd do with thirteen lovers." 

Treize smiled up at him from his knees. For the first time, he truly felt like his own person. He felt individual. He understood the reformist position perfectly. 

There wasn't enough oxygen in the air for what came next to be anything but slow, for them to do anything but take their time. Treize went back up to his feet and tugged Eiður over to the bed and they went down on it together in a tangle of limbs that resolved with Treize stretched out on top of Eiður, his mouth at Eiður's neck, pressed to the slim band of blue where the lumenium had spent so many years rubbing. He pulled himself up on his knees and fumbled in the drawer at the side of the bed, found the oil he knew Cinq kept there and they did it like that, Treize slicking Eiður's cock, Treize kneeling astride Eiður's hips, Treize pushing the length of him up inside himself, gasping in a breath. Eiður's hands grasped at Treize's too-hot thighs as they moved, as Eiður braced his heels against the mattress and pushed up against him slowly, as Treize shifted his weight to ride him, his hands spread out against Eiður's broad chest. Treize set an almost languid pace. Eiður seemed happy to let him. 

And when they were done, they showered with the water temperature turned down as cold as it would go, Treize's hands in Eiður's hair, Eiður's mouth at Treize's neck, his jaw, the pulse points there. Then they returned to bed and slept as best they could in the heat. Treize had never thought he'd be glad of the cold, except perhaps there was more Valhallan in him than he'd ever realised. And he didn't put in his transceiver because for once, for maybe one last time, he wanted to keep it all to himself.

They returned to bed and slept because there'd be work to do in the morning. Treize knew they'd be lucky to come out of it alive. 

\---

They woke to Cinq sitting himself down on the end of the bed with an exaggeratedly wounded expression on his face. 

"I thought I told you to wait for me!" he said, and Treize raised his brows at him once he'd put on and activated his glasses, which he'd been completely unsurprised to find matched Cinq's completely. When Eiður left the bed naked and completely unselfconscious to locate his discarded clothing that was still lying there scattered across the floor, Cinq raised his brows at Treize in return. 

"Oh, I like him," Cinq said. 

"Surprisingly, so do I," Treize replied. 

Eiður turned to them both, glancing from one of them to the other and back again as he stood there, still completely naked but with his leather trousers hanging from his hands. 

"On the other hand, I'm still making my mind up about both of you," he said, doing a poor job of hiding a smile as he started to dress. If there hadn't been an undercurrent of tension to the whole exchange, Treize might have been pleased that they'd finally met Cinq in person.

They drank their breakfast on the way to the hangar, a bottle each of odd greenish liquid that Treize knew was a kind of nutrient soup most of the Treizième had been living on for years by then, synthetic food at its finest. It didn't taste of much, especially to a Valhallan palate, but it was filling and mostly inoffensive, even if Eiður looked at it as if it might as well have been a bottle of blended vipers. Then they settled into chairs at a console in a comms room and tried to raise Þruðvangr. Their levity died down. Treize knew they'd only been using it to distract from the situation at hand anyway.

An hour later, while preparations were still being made down in the hangar below, six ships being loaded, it was Halla that finally answered. She was sitting in a stone-walled comms room somewhere in the chieftain's complex there on Þruðvangr, bleeding from her nose, a handkerchief pressed against it, her hand stained a rusty shade of red. 

"Eiður," she said. Her teeth were red with blood in her mouth as she spoke. "Is there a reason you're calling from Nivôse?"

"We have a cure," Eiður said. 

"That's not funny." 

"Good. It's not meant to be." 

"Then what the fuck are you waiting for?" she said. "If you leave it much longer, there'll be nothing left to cure."

"We'll be coming in Treizième ships," Treize told her. "We need to get down to the surface. Will that be a problem?"

"Maybe, if you want to get here in one piece," Halla replied. "The Admiralty's expecting a Treizième attack so they've dispatched Muninn and Huginn. They'll be here in six or seven hours."

"Can you tell them to let us through?" Treize asked, though he supposed he already knew the answer and found no particular optimism with which to ask the question.

"Can you tell it not to snow in winter?" Halla replied, with a wry smile on her bloodied lips. "They've got warrants out for both of you. They want you dead."

"Well, fuck," Eiður said, which more or less summed up the situation in its entirety. "Looks like we'll be arriving at basically the same time as them. _Fuck_."

"Then you'll just have to get here first," Halla said. Again, the idea was simple; again, it just wouldn't be easy.

They took six small ships. Small ships were all they really needed, just big enough to distribute the cure into the main water sources there on Þruðvangr and who knew, perhaps small enough to dart back out of Valhallan territory before the two huge battleships arrived with their hundreds-strong fighter detachments and wiped them all out of the universe. Valhallan ships were usually designed for speed and not so much for manoeuvrability whereas the Treizième ships' designs were entirely the other way around, deft in close quarters but substantially less impressive in terms of velocity, so the match would be a close one. 

Cinq asked for volunteers when they reached the hangar and Eiður stepped forward and so did Treize, together, side by side; Treize supposed it hadn't been in question that the two of them would go, considering one of the ships they'd been loading was Eiður's borrowed Valhallan. A Sylvie and an Olivier came forward next, with two Anaïses making up their required six. Treize felt oddly proud of them, not that he said as much.

"I thought you said you couldn't pilot a ship," Eiður said, lingering close as the others started to disperse to their ships. 

"I said I couldn't pilot a _Valhallan_ ship," Treize replied. "You taught me to skate instead, if you remember. And we only have one of those anyway, and that's yours." 

Eiður conceded the point with a tense nod, and they made their way across the room toward the ships, Eiður's hand at the small of Treize's back. He knew Eiður wished he'd stay there on Nivôse with Cinq and the Benoîts and the Magalies and all the others, but he also knew he wouldn't ask him to stay behind when this was just as much his fight as it was Eiður's: he'd been sent to cure Thor's Virus, after all, and Treize couldn't let the formula for a cure to a man-made virus be all he'd achieved in his whole life when there were people already infected, when people were on their way to death and he could actually _cure_ it. When they stopped by Treize's ship and turned to each other by the shallow ramp that led up into the main compartment, he already knew Eiður understood. If he died, at least he'd have died for a reason. He'd have died for the _right_ reason.

"I'll see you soon," Eiður said, his big hands squeezing there at Treize's shoulders. 

"Do you really believe that?" Treize asked. 

Eiður nodded. "Yes."

Treize didn't believe him, not for a second. He brought up his hands, brushed the pads of his thumbs against the corners of Eiður's mouth and said, "Tu as ce sourire au coin des lèvres quand tu mens."

Eiður ducked his head. "I've never heard you speak Treizième before," he said, which was no response to the statement at all even if it was true. Every step of the way, they'd spoken Valhallan, even though notionally Eiður had been assigned to him because he spoke Treizième. He hadn't even been close enough to hear the words he'd said to Jérôme Douze. 

"Do you understand?" Treize asked. 

"Yes." Eiður lifted his head and took Treize's face in his hands, his palms cupping his jaw. He looked at him steadily, levelly. "Je t'aime," he said. "Am I lying this time?"

Treize's pulse skipped. Treize's stomach clenched. He leaned up and he kissed him, knowing they might never had another moment like it.

"No, you're not lying," he said.

Eiður clapped his arms around him; Treize did the same, but only for a moment. They pulled back, and then they went their separate ways. 

\---

Muninn loomed large in orbit around Þruðvangr when they disengaged their hyperdrives and punched into Valhallan space. Eiður swore under his breath over the comm link. Olivier 909 said something similar in Treizième and Sylvie 5422404 laughed at him. 

Treize wondered how many times 909 had died with such a low number, just 909 out of six million Oliviers. They'd spoken about it sometimes, the Loïcs in the link, so he knew not all the clone genres were anything like they were; their skills and their looks weren't the only difference by far. Most clones died of natural causes, particularly virulent infections, accidents, but the military clones were another story altogether because for some of them, death was just part of their training and with six million clones in their link and with their imperfect recall, with their cavalier attitudes to death and reinstancing, sometimes all that the Oliviers and the Sylvies had was how many times they'd died and in how many different ways. He wondered how many times 909 had died and if that made it better or worse. He wondered if 5422404 had ever died at all. He didn't ask. 

"What do we do?" asked Anaïs 229398. 

"Can we get through?" asked Anaïs 833709.

Frankly, Treize was surprised the Anaïs genre had known how to pilot a ship at all; they were medics, doctors and nurses and medical researchers, pharmacists, physiotherapists, not pilots. But he'd come to understand that they could all be more than they'd been born to be.

"Stick to the plan," Eiður told them grimly. "We'll get through." 

They made for the planet, diving down into the atmosphere, then split from their loose formation mid-flight and headed for their individual drop points. The Valhallans on Muninn were still in the midst of fighter deployment - it seemed they'd arrived only minutes before they had - and so relatively few of their complement were available to follow them down; Treize supposed that counted for something, if not for much. 

The two Anaïses were bound for the rivers Körmt and Örmt that rose in the mountains in the frozen south and flowed underground to Þruðvangr's two smallest cities. 909 took the Vimur, the great fast-flowing ice river in the east that fed the plains towns by the oldest and richest of the lumenium mines still in operation, while Sylvie 5422404 swung out toward Hvergelmir, the springs that rose up in the western mountains. Treize's mark was fairly simple to discern there on Þruðvangr's landscape, perhaps 700 miles outside Bilskírnir though it fed the planet's second city rather than its first. He headed for the Gandvik sea-lake, the vast body of water that Eiður had told him overflowed its banks for a few weeks each year after Þórr's Day and irrigated the plains just long enough and widely enough for Þruðvangr's few hardy fruits to grow. There was an orchard there, near his mother's home town. In his childhood, when his sister had still been alive, they'd played there in the summer. 

Treize had a clear run and dropped the payload of the cure from his ship into the waters in just six short passes, but he could hardly feel particularly triumphant when he could hear the others loud in his ears over their comm link. One of the Anaïses, and to his shame Treize couldn't figure out which one it was, had been shot down leaving Körmt. Sylvie 5422404 cursed hotly as she ejected over Hvergelmir with her ship spiralling into the water and when her voice cut out, Treize had no idea if she'd lived or died, let alone what she might do next if she _had_ lived. 909 exited the atmosphere followed by three Valhallan fighters, ducking fire, but he was a pilot by trade and perhaps the most adept of all of them, perhaps even more so than Eiður since he'd been a pilot since he'd first been instanced centuries ago. Treize turned his ship toward Nivôse and sped up into the atmosphere. He was ready to leave and hope what they'd done would work they way the projections all said it would.

"Eiður, report," he said, breaking through the clouds. 

"I'm pinned down," Eiður replied, the comm link crackling with interference from the Valhallan shots that were firing all around him. Treize's stomach sank. He gripped the wheel of his ship just a fraction tighter. 

"I'll come for you. I'll draw them off."

"Don't you fucking dare. You're not dying here." 

"So land. Go to your parents."

"Yeah, and I'd still be a traitor," Eiður said. "They shouldn't have to choose between me and the fucking Commonwealth, Treize."

"They'd choose you."

"And then the Admiralty would burn Bilskírnir to the ground to get to me. Don't tell me you don't believe that."

The problem was Treize _did_ believe it. The Admiralty took a hard line against traitors, and against those who harboured them; it was part of their strength, he supposed, or at least part of the strength of their rule, just like Céleste's treats to the Jérômes. 

"Go," Eiður said. 

"But--"

" _Go_."

"I--" 

"So help me, if I have to tell you again, Treize. _Go_."

So he went. He hated himself the very instant he did it but he went because Eiður told him to, he left Þruðvangr, took his ship up out of the atmosphere and shot through the far left flank of the Valhallan raiders. A quick slingshot around the conveniently closeby second moon, the deft manoeuvre more than the Valhallan fighters could handle, and he was away; there was a bright feeling of victory as he escaped but then comms with Eiður cut off abruptly and he had no idea if that was because of the distance or because of something else entirely, something he didn't want to contemplate but that leapt up sickly in his sharp imagination. But he couldn't go back and he knew it. If he went back, there was no way he wouldn't die. He wondered if maybe he should have done it anyway. 

At top speed, Nivôse was almost six hours away. Once he punched through into hyperspace, he knew all he could do was sit there in the cockpit and wait and so that was what he did; when he punched back out, Nivôse was crawling with Céleste's Quatorzième ships, the insignia hastily splashed over their hulls, bright red, above the company seal of the Vortex Corporation who'd made those ships in the first place. Céleste had positioned herself perfectly for all of this, for her takeover, for dominion over the twelve planets and over all the clones and all the citizens; in her addresses she said she'd keep the status quo but Treize knew the status quo just meant Céleste's iron rule over everyone, every citizen and every clone. Of course, she'd killed the one person in the whole republic who'd known where their lumenium reserves were stored; back in their shared cell, Jérôme Douze had explained it, how Premier had created decoy locations just to fool the other instances from his visual memories, so he could do his job to the very best of his ability. He'd taken pride in the role he played in their survival, if he hadn't been proud of all they'd done.

Treize dove for the planet, his ship grazed by gunfire, though part way down the Treizième ships swelled up from the surface, guns blazing, to cover his descent. The cannons on the planet surface erupted, spat fire into the sky and took three Quatorzième ships apart mid-air. The rest backed off and let him go, surging back up into the upper atmosphere to lie in wait, no doubt. Nivôse had been relatively easy to take, given how few people, either clones or citizens, actually resided there. It was more military installation than colony, for the most part, and for the moment Loïc Cinq was its leader. Every clone there had rallied to him, but that didn't mean they were even remotely safe; they still needed reinforcements. 

Treize landed in the hangar, at least mostly safely, and stalked down his ship's loading ramp into the hangar bay. He headed for the control room, the heat around him already oppressive, and found Cinq in there, slumped in a chair in the corner, his transceiver housed. So Treize did the exact same thing himself; he stepped into the link and he took his place in the circle. He found them all there. Treize made thirteen.

"We have Frimaire," said Neuf.

"We have Thermidor," said Trois. 

"We have Floréal," said Dix. 

"Céleste says we'll never have Brumaire," said Premier. "But we'll see about that." 

They talked about the reformist movement and though that was hardly what Treize wanted to hear about, he understood how important it was. They talked about how they'd taken four of the twelve worlds now in the name of that movement and that two of them were Vortex strongholds, full of ships, full of armaments, full of Oliviers and Sylvies and downtrodden Pierres and Yvettes who'd picked up on the movement's ideals and made them their own. They didn't want to die again and Céleste promised that all rebels would never be reinstanced, that they'd all just cease to be, but somehow it wasn't enough to stop them, especially not when they heard Céleste had no idea where their lumenium reserves were. 

She said that was precisely why they needed Þruðvangr; Loïc Premier went on the air and said the lumenium was just an excuse. They had civil war. The war with the Valhallan Commonwealth would have to wait. And Treize wasn't sure what a clone-led integrated society would look like, but at the very least he was sure the Loïcs would try to make it fair for all. 

"Now all we have to do is take the other eight worlds, kill Céleste and persuade the Valhallans not to kill us all," Cinq said. 

"Always the optimist, Cinq," said Premier. "We'll get there." Treize suspected they would, but the question he wanted answered still hadn't come up at all.

He stood. "Did we succeed on Þruðvangr?" Treize asked, all eyes on him. 

Premier nodded curtly. "We have reports that the cure has entered the cities and most citizens are responding well," he said. "We have confirmation that Oláf Sigmarsson and his family are alive in Bilskírnir. We've transmitted the formula for the cure with precise instructions for its preparation to every planet in the Treizième _and_ to Þruðvangr, Fólkvangr and Vanhöll. We've even sent word to Mandar and the Indusians."

Treize nodded in response, grateful but still tense. "And Eiður?"

Cinq went to him, walked across the white floor in the white room in the Loïcs' link and put a hand on Cinq's shoulder. The air of gritty optimism in the room faded down. Neuf couldn't even look at him.

"There's a message I should play for you," Cinq said. "I don't think he's coming back."

Treize crumpled. He'd lost him.

\---

In the ship, heading steadily farther from Treizième - Quatorzième? - space, Treize sometimes still listens to the message. 

He wakes once per year, which is the standard for deep space, long-distance voyages. He wakes and he drinks one bottle of Treizième nutrient soup that tastes of nothing at all and sometimes he listens to the message while he sits there, drinking, replenishing all the minerals and salts that the cryochamber drains just through its normal usage. Sometimes he's awake for fifteen minutes, to drink and check his course and drop out of hyperspace just to see the stars and not a strange, fuzzy wasteland when he looks out of the window. 

Sometimes he's awake for days, drifting in an anti-grav chamber to counteract some of the physical effects of cryosleep, sometimes just walking the corridors until his muscles feel less like lead and more like part of him again. The interior of the ship is so very different to Muninn or the craft they'd borrowed from Hallmar, all luminescent white panels where the Valhallans favour textured metal alloys. It's nothing like Valhallan tech. It's like the ship he was born on, where it was always too hot, too where he always felt tired. He's turned up the oxygen and turned down the heat but sometimes he still wakes feeling clammy and breathless. 

Sometimes, he looks at the maps, sweeping their virtual forms with his hands to see the distances, trajectories, how far he's come and how far he still has to go. From the closest planet of the Treizième République, the journey to Brahmaputra takes three months in hyperspace. It's four or five months to Ravin, depending on launch points and landing points and the hyperspace turbulence usually experienced along the way. Indus Prime takes seven. To reach Mandar and its moons takes nine months, sometimes ten. He's never been there, never been to any of those places, but the nav computer tells him all he needs to know.

From the Treizième, the closest potentially habitable planets that aren't occupied by the Valhallans, by the Mandars or by the Indusians are perhaps four years away at the very least, at the very highest speed, but they all know those worlds were discarded by the first settlers of the exodus. They're even more inhospitable in climate than Þruðvangr is, and the Valhallans of Þruðvangr aren't exactly scared of a little hardship. Eiður never was.

It's been twelve years now and he's passed those worlds by. The war is probably over by now, but he'll probably never know how it all worked out. He's no longer part of it. He hopes he made the right choice.

The first time he stopped was at the borderline in space where the distance became too great for his transceiver to cover. The ship had been programmed to punch out of hyperspace at that point, to give him one last chance to say goodbye to the Loïcs before he continued and when he stepped into the link they were all there waiting. They hadn't won the war, Premier told him, at least not yet, but they were making headway. The Valhallans hadn't attacked, at least not yet. Cinq clasped him by the shoulders and wished him well. So did Neuf, which perhaps the others saw as out of character but Treize knew Neuf understood; if there'd been a way for Loïc Neuf to find Jérôme Premier, he'd have done it in a heartbeat. 

They said goodbye and he left them there, went out into the ship and sat down to his first white nutrient cocktail and he listened to the message through headphones at the table though he remembered it word for word already. And then he stepped back into the cryochamber and he went to sleep.

" _Tell Treize I'm going home_ ," Eiður said, in the message. The recording crackled as he neared the extent of his comms range. " _If he comes back, tell him he knows where to find me_."

The day after they'd cured Þruðvangr was the day he decided to leave. In the start, it wasn't a conscious decision; he hadn't intended to leave, hadn't thought about making preparations, had actually thought he'd have to stay or at least it would be best if he did because the rest of his genre had their parts to play and so, he thought, must he. That day, he worked with Cinq in the labs on Nivôse, helped to rally troops, relayed messages to Halla and her family on Þruðvangr and he was pleased to see she was responding both quickly and well. They worked hard, though the air seemed too hot, it seemed like breathing through water, nothing like the air on Fólkvangr where he'd lived his whole life. He missed it, he realised. When he went outside into the streets on Nivôse it was colder but not _cold_ ; the architecture there was wrong, too, all wide boulevards typical to the Treizième, all neat rows of roads, right angles, parallels, perpendiculars. He missed the bite of the chill in the air and the winding roads and the smell of the food in the halls. He'd come home at last but felt like he'd left home half a galaxy away. 

That night, he shared Cinq's bed, lying there side by side with their transceivers housed after a hearty meal of nutrient soup, which, if he'd stayed, he might have lobbied to change. He closed his eyes. He stepped into the link, Cinq right by his side. The Loïcs were there. They were waiting for them.

"We've been thinking," Trois said, which sounded particularly ominous coming from someone like Trois. 

"What have you been thinking _about_?" Treize asked in reply, his brow furrowing suspiciously. 

"We've been thinking about you," Premier said. "About your role here. About Eiður."

"What about him?"

"We know you miss him, Treize."

"I'd have thought that was obvious."

"We think you should go." 

Treize's frown deepened. "You think I should _go_?"

"We think you should find him," Neuf said. 

"Don't you need me?"

"I know you like to think you're indispensable, Treize..." Cinq said, with his usual smile, while all the other Loïcs looked on. 

"You make me feel so wanted."

"What this idiot's trying to say is we were fine without you for forty years," Trois said, albeit with a faint smile gathering at the corners of his mouth that looked just like Cinq's. "We'll be fine without you now, too." Then he went across the room clasped Treize by the biceps. "But don't think that means we won't miss you."

"And we'll be here till you move out of range," Premier said. 

"You mean it, don't you." 

Cinq came over, stood there by Trois and took him by the shoulders. "We mean it," he said. "You've done enough. Let us do the rest." 

And maybe he'd done enough because he'd done more than he'd ever thought he'd do in his life at all, and so he left. They'd already prepared a ship for him, and Eiður was right: provided he was still alive, Treize knew where to find him. He couldn't have meant Þruðvangr, they'd already established that it would be too dangerous for both him and his family. He couldn't have meant Fólkvangr because even if he might have been able to make it there, he was still a fugitive. Valhöll was out of the question, though perhaps Hallmar would have helped him. None of the Treizième worlds would do. Mandar had never been home to him and nor had the Indusian Empire. 

But Treize knew where he was going. All those stories, images, tapestries, they all told him where Eiður would go. _Earth_ was home. So he launched the ship under Treizième cover against the Quatorzième fire, he set coordinates and said goodbye and he punched into hyperspace. He put himself into cryosleep, and he dreamed of Earth.

He woke from cryosleep last night. He drank a pint of nutrient solution as he clicked the ring that was missing its lumenium against the side of his glass and he listened to the message; he spent an hour in anti-grav and then listened again. The ship punched out of hyperspace an hour after that and Treize looked out of the viewports at the stars and at the planets and he wondered, as the ship picked up the pulse of a homing beacon on a world just hours away, if he'd find him there. He wondered if Eiður had made it there to Earth, wondered if that beacon was his, wondered if he'd made it out of Valhallan space at all or if he'd been shot down before he could even make the jump to hyperspace. He wondered how long it might have taken him in his little Valhallan ship, if he'd been there for years already because everyone knew Valhallan ships were faster. 

He wondered if he'd still look the same or if he'd aged at all, if there'd be grey in his hair and lines on his face. He wondered if he'd found people still there on Earth or if he'd been there all alone; everyone had left with the exodus, of course, but who knew who might have returned. He wondered if Eiður had made himself a home there, a hall like they'd seen at Himinbjörg. He wondered if he still loved him, if he'd even remember his name. And then he went to sleep and he dreamed and he wished he'd had the others there. He still misses them almost more than he's missed Eiður. They were always there and now they're not, but if Eiður's there then he'll have no regrets at all; after all, their memories will always be with him.

Today, the beacon's still pulsing and he begins his descent with his heart in his mouth with the anxiety of it. He begins his descent with the day they met playing there in his head and then all the days after it, the view from the roof with Eiður's arms around his waist, Eiður's smile, his big hands, every conversation that they ever had. He begins his descent knowing that without him, the person he is now would have stayed tucked up in a corner of his mind and he'd never have been free. He begins his descent knowing that without him, he'd never even have known that he wanted that freedom to begin with.

He's missed him. And if Eiður's there, Treize will never leave again.

He's missed him. And if Eiður's not there, Treize will never stop looking for him.


End file.
